How to lose support and alienate people: The Progressive Alliance communication strategy

When attempting to build a broad political coalition you've decided to call "The Progressive Alliance", it may be considered wise not to deliberately antagonise pretty much anyone with vaguely progressive or left-leaning views ... but there's no telling liberal capitalist aggro-centrists how to do political communication is there?

• Liberal capitalists laid the groundwork for Brexit by propping up the ruinous Austerity Coalition, which caused the unprecedented wage collapse, failing public services, the housing crisis, and the devastating under-investment that the Brexiteers then cynically weaponised by blaming on immigrants and the EU.

• They delivered their own worst nightmare of Brexit with their condescending and ineffective "jobs for the boys" non-campaign.

• They blew probably the best opportunity ever to hammer the Tories by turning the Brexit referendum result into an excuse to launch a bitter factionalist coup to get rid of Labour's democratically elected leader instead!

• Then they handed the keys of Downing Street to Boris Johnson by turning the 2019 General Election into a rerun of the Brexit referendum they'd already lost. 

If these people has 1% of the strategic capabilities they imagine themselves to have, we wouldn't be in anything like as much of a mess as a nation, but they will keep insisting that tepid, unappealing, liberal capitalist gruel must be the only alternative to radically right-wing conservative capitalist poison.

A lot of the People's Vote campaigners who invested so much work in throwing the 2019 general election have respawned themselves as The Progressive Alliance, which apparently aims to remove the Tories from power by building an astonishingly unlikely political coalition.

I won't spend too much time explaining why it's so unlikely, you just have to consider the vitriolic anti-SNP bile in Keir Starmer's much-lauded Labour conference speech to understand that the Labour right detest the SNP Westminster-outsiders infinitely more than they mildly disapprove of their Tory Westminster brethren.

Anyway. Onto the astonishing infographic in the article header image.

This is a real thing, that was actually designed and approved by Progressive Alliance people, and posted on their social media accounts (here's the link on Facebook, at least until they delete it).

"But The Lib-Dems went into coalition with the Tories"

The Progressive Alliance may try to trivialise this with the misleading claim that it all happened "a decade ago" when the Lib-Dems were still enabling Tory malice will into 2015, and the Brexiteer-style cry of "get over it", but the fact is that the ruinous Austerity Coalition imposed a shocking range of anti-progressive policies that are still causing devastating social and economic consequences today. 

What's more, the Lib-Dems are completely unapologetic about it, to the extent that they picked one of the very worst Tory-collaborators, Ed Davey, as their their new leader, when they had the chance to turn over a new leaf with the much more progressive Layla Moran.

The message here is that if you're horrified by austerity ruination; systematic "fit for work" disability persecution; Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment and the ensuing the Windrush scandal; the worst period of wage repression in recorded history; unlawful Tribunal Fees; the Royal Mail scam and £billions in other privatisation rip-offs; the student loan betrayal; the brutal social security sanctions regime; arms sales to tyrants, despots and war criminals; privatising literally thousands of schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers; devastating local government cuts; economically illiterate cuts to the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, R&D); or any of the other profoundly anti-progressive policies enacted between 2010 and 2015, you can just piss off, because this lot don't want your vote.

"Jeremy Corbyn is no longer Labour leader"

The logic of attacking Jeremy Corbyn supporters and socialists in general is unclear.

Apparently sneering at them with the Brexiteer style slogan "he lost, get over it" is going to magically win them over to the Progressive Alliance cause!

Who cares that Corbyn was demonised by the press and repeatedly sabotaged from within his own party, purely for promoting progressive social and economic policies?

If you supported Corbyn's policy platform, you can also piss off, because the so-called Progressive Alliance don't want your vote!

"Blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair blah blah Iraq"

The UK government ignored the legitimate concerns of millions of British people, illegally invaded another country, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a refugee crisis of millions.

They triggered a cycle of terrorist violence that spread throughout the target country, across the entire region, and eventually culminated in terrorist atrocities across Europe perpetrated by the ISIS fanatics that metastasised out the lawless terrorism breeding grounds that Tony Blair and his ilk created in Iraq.

"Blah blah jabber jabber ... get over it": What an arrogant and offensive way to dismiss legitimate concerns over one of modern Britain's most horrific foreign policy catastrophes! 

If you're the kind of progressively-minded person who opposed the Iraq war, the so-called Progressive Alliance clearly hold your political opinions in the same regard as dog much on their shoes, they simply don't want your vote.

"The Lib-Dems will just flounce off with the Tories"

They want to re-argue point one over again, just to make their list look longer, but the essence of their case is that we should just trust the Lib-Dems this time, despite them being led by one of the worst Lib-Dem ministers in the ruinous Austerity Coalition!

This is less an effort to tell potential voters to piss off, more of a desperate appeal to the astonishingly gullible!

"But Keith ... [insert politically illiterate rant here]"

Ah right.

listen up!

Anyone who has any concerns whatever about Keir Starmer's pathetic abstention of a leadership so far; his broken pledges; his obsession with factionalist infighting; his campaign of abuse against left-wing and socially progressive Jews; his repeated purges of left-wing and progressive voices out of his shadow cabinet; his abject failure to hold the Tory government to account; his repeated abstentions on sickeningly anti-progressive pieces of Tory legislation like the Rape Cops Bill; or even just his robotic lack of charisma.

You can all piss off too!

"I will always vote for [party] out of loyalty"

Nobody doubts that tribal voters exist, but has anyone ever uttered such an unconvincing phrase to say that they won't tactically vote to get the Tories out?

I guess if we're expected to believe that people said "blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair jabber jabber Iraq". we're expected to believe anything!

And as for pointless tribally motivated voting, what about all the liberal capitalist dweebs who went out and belligerently voted Lib-Dem and Green in ultra tight Labour-Tory marginals in 2019, despite Labour caving in and offering them the sore loser referendum they said they wanted?

Loads of these people, who helped create a Tory mega-majority, have now quietly thrown away their "People's Vote" outfits, and come back wearing "Progressive Alliance" garb, to tell other people how to vote!

Conclusion

Given the shockingly outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system, I tend to agree with tactical voting, and have voted tactically myself in the past.

People like me should be the natural target audience for a campaign like The Progressive Alliance, but for whatever reason they've decided to tell me to "piss off" four different ways, taken me for a gullible idiot, and insulted my intelligence, all in a single infographic!

They're clearly more concerned with laundering the reputations of their liberal capitalist idols like Tory Blair, the Lib-Dem austerity enablers, the right-wing Labour saboteurs, and the democracy-defying CUK squatters, who all helped turn people away from progressive politics in different ways. and installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street, than in actually building a broad coalition of progressive and left-wing people.

If our hopes of a better future rely on the strategic capabilities of this lot, we're clearly doomed to Tory rule forever!

 

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People's Vote are just as willing to use deceptive propaganda as the Brextremists

Despite all the numpties trying to pretend that Labour's Brexit position is too complicated to understand, it was always a quite simple strategy of trying to de-escalate and de-toxify Brexit by reconciling Leave and Remain instead of picking either the 52% or the 48% and tailoring their policies exclusively for them.

With Labour's vote share collapsing to leave them in 3rd place between the (exclusively 52%) Brexit Party and the (exclusively 48%) Lib-Dems, it's quite clear that people don't actually want Brexit reconciliation.

It doesn't matter how much it actually makes sense to try to de-escalate Brexit so that it doesn't continue degenerating towards an outright culture war between the two polar extremes, there's no way to pretend that it's popular.

Compromise and reconciliation are deeply unsexy political concepts when most people seem to want the certainty of picking one side or the other and naively hoping that their side doesn't end up on the losing side of the culture war they're gearing up for.

If I was forced to pick a side in a do-or-die showdown between the two polar extremes of the debate I'd obviously end up on the Remain side because "no deal" is such an unbelievably stupid concept that would trash our economy and absolutely burn all of the UK's negotiating capital the instant we did it.

But there's no denying that the Remain faction is just as riddled with ideological militants, opportunists, and outright liars as the opposite end of the spectrum.

The People's Vote graph in the article header is proof of how far these people will go to deceive.

After months of relentlessly misrepresenting Labour's position (oppose "no deal", repeatedly oppose Tory Brexit, push for a general Election, propose a fail safe least harmful version of Brexit, support calls for a final say referendum) as nasty pro-Brexit fanaticism in order to drive voters into the arms of the Lib-Dems, they're suddenly claiming Labour as a Remain party because it's the only possible way to make it look like the pro-Brexit parties (Brexit Party, Tories, UKIP) didn't win a bigger vote share than the exclusively Remain parties.

The weirdest thing about this kind of deception is the cultish myopia of it.

It's not designed to deceive Leave voters into change their mind, nor to deceive the undecided.

It's pure self-delusion aimed at convincing their own tribe that they won a clear majority, when the only way to create this deception is to suddenly appropriate the support of the very people they've been relentlessly misrepresenting, attacking and abusing for over a year in order to erode their support and pinch their voters!

An herein lies the danger of an another roll of the dice referendum.

It doesn't matter how much you dislike the Brextremists, it's obvious that their propaganda is clearly and unambiguously designed to win people over to their cause. They won the 2016 referendum, and Farage's Brexit Party just stormed these Euro elections. No matter how much we may dislike it, their propaganda is effective, and it clearly works.

Even though Remain lost in 2016 and they've got a lot of convincing to do in order to make up the ground, People's Vote propaganda like this isn't designed to win people over at all, it's purely self-righteous reassurance for the echo chamber.

The only people retweeting this blatantly deceptive graph are clearly on a Remainer self-delusion trip.

They don't want to admit that they've wasted the last three years so badly that despite all the Brexit chaos, and uncertainty, and deadlock, the exclusively 52% parties still somehow bagged a bigger vote share than the exclusively 48% parties.

The Tories have done such a spectacular job of ballsing Brexit up that Remain should be winning the argument all over the country by now, but their absolute obsession with a sore-loser referendum, their mobilisation behind the pro-austerity Lib-Dems who helped the Tories cause Brexit in the first place, and their spreading of absurd self-deception nonsense like this clearly answers the question of how Brexit Party swept the vast majority of English and Welsh constituencies.

It turns out that an awful lot of Remainers aren't even remotely interested in reaching out to left-behind communities to explain that it was domestic government policies like neoliberalism, privatisation mania, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net that caused the living standards collapse, not immigrants and the EU.

In fact they're so uninterested in winning this argument they've actually flocked to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation Lib-Dem neoliberals, which is all very well in the mainly-metropolitan and well-to-do patches of the country that never experienced the full force of ruinous Tory austerity, but Remainers actively rewarding the austerity-enablers makes winning the argument even harder in the much more numerous places that were wracked by austerity fanaticism, and just turned out in much bigger numbers to vote for the far-right Brexit Party Faragists.
These people aren't interested in effective campaigning at all, all they're interested in is smugly congratulating themselves that they were right all along.

If they wilfully refuse to deal with the issues and injustices that caused Brexit in the first place in preference for spreading ridiculously misleading infographics designed to convince themselves that they won when they're still somehow losing, then they're never going to triumph in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much of their time, effort, and resources on demanding are they?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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