Remember the Brexit as the moment when xenophobia won

[Denzil_DC]

63. "The left" in the UK lost the ability to counter that sort of missplaced blame

(the blame for the ills motivating most folks who would be subsceptible to leftist arguments) under New Labour and Blair.

I'm talking about blaming the EU (and immigration) for the most pressing ills that people are complaining about in their everyday lives, when it's the policies of successive UK governments, including Labour itself in more recent times, that are the primary causes.

They disrespected, ignored and effectively dismantled a local infrastructure in the Constituency Labour Parties that was embedded in communities, because they thought it was less troublesome to rely on more "modern" methods of communicating with and attracting voters on those rare occasions when they could be bothered even thinking about voters - every four or five years when they needed to mobilize to keep them in power. (CLP's could be a major thorn in the side of the New Labour leadership because they brought unwelcome resolutions to conference and tended to weed out non-local right-wingers from standing as candidates, which meant that the leadership couldn't reward loyal apparatchiks by parachuting them into safe seats without a serious fight.)

The old CLPs were indigenous. They tied in with long-established initiatives like the Workers' Educational Association that would be able to help people explore and identify the political reasons behind the ills their communities were experiencing, and local union branches that had earned people's trust by being there for them when they needed them.

Once they as a result had to rely on the media for their main form of outreach, they had to suck up to it - so Blair courted the likes of Murdoch, and it skewed Labour's priorities and meant that policy became hostage to other agendas and messaging that could turn on a hairpin if Labour, on increasingly rare occasions, looked like it might do anything to seriously challenge the status quo and big business interests. It also led to a greater emphasis on fundraising because there were advertising and costly photo ops to fund that didn't come cheap, which along with the denigration of union funding meant that they needed to rely increasingly on rich sponsors from the business community.

They lost touch. They've reaped the whirlwind of that most notably in Scotland, but it applies everywhere. There's no way to rebuild that from scratch nowadays. There might be a chance to recoup some of it in a smaller way with the groundswell of popular support for Corbyn, but the PLP is suspicious of that for the very reasons I outlined above for why they turned away from the CLPs in the first place, and seems keen to alienate that new blood at the earliest opportunity.

So these local communities have to find their own fragmented sources of information elsewhere. And that's generally the mainstream media and the conventional wisdom of the pub and modern workplace and what their neighbours think etc.

And so here we are.