Labourlist Column
My Labourlist column this week is about Ed Miliband and the Occupy protests:
http://labourlist.org/2011/11/occupy-what-eds-article-was-about/
posted by Luke Akehurst at 1:05 pm
Monday, November 07, 2011
http://labourlist.org/2011/11/occupy-what-eds-article-was-about/
About Me
- Name: Luke Akehurst
- Location: Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Labour Party activist since 1988 - firmly on the moderate wing of the party. Member of Labour’s NEC 2010-2012 and since 2020. National Secretary of Labour Students 1995-6. Parliamentary candidate for Aldershot (2001) and Castle Point (2005). Hackney Councillor (Chatham Ward) 2002-2014, Labour Group Chief Whip 2002-09, Chair of Health Scrutiny 2010-2014. Supporter of Europe, NATO/nuclear deterrence, Israel, electoral reform. Guardian reader. Dad. Oxford resident. Unite union member. Employment history as a Labour Party Organiser, Local Government Political Assistant, Director at a Public Affairs company. All views expressed in a personal capacity. The rest will become evident from reading the blog.
2 Comments:
"I fear a similar effect to the way in which student and hippy anti-war protests in 1968 drove traditional blue-collar Democrats into the arms of Richard Nixon and created a Republican hegemony that lasted for 40 years"
Let us not overdo the pessimism here! Between 1968 and 2008, the Democrats won just 4 out of 11 presidential elections. True but far from inevitable.
1968: Could easily have gone the other way.
1980: Carter and Reagan were deadlocked in the opinion polls until Reagan broke through in the televised debate a week before polling day. The economy was in a very bad way at the time.
1988, 2000 and 2004: The Democrats did not so much lose these as throw them away. Also, the last two featured plenty of electoral fraud by the Republicans.
We should be very careful before accepting Luke's interpretation of events.
3:44 pm, November 10, 2011
The previous comment makes some interesting points.
We should not forget that President Johnson had actually been elected in 1964 with a pledge not to escalate the war.
What enabled Vice President Humphrey to close the gap with Nixon in 1968 appears to have been his distancing from Johnson on the question of the Vietnam War. And then Johnson halted the bombing.
Fearing that an end to the war would cost him the election, the Nixon camp secretly persuaded the South Vietnamese government to keep out of peace negotiations.
Thus Nixon may well have helped cause the deaths of thousands of American servicemen and far more Vietnamese and Cambodians.
5:56 pm, November 10, 2011
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