1. Political education matters, and it isn’t a given. My mum, a single parent on benefits throughout my childhood, at a point when single mums and their children were entirely demonised by the Tories, nevertheless voted for Thatcher and thinks taxes are bad. /thread https://twitter.com/maryameliarobbo/status/1390961078339833857

2/ I got into uni (to study politics of all things) without actually having got the memo about the basic ideological differences between right- and left-wing politics. The internet makes this kind of information so much more easily available now, but these things are not obvious.

3. Labour needs to explain these differences. And no, it isn’t ‘patronising’, unless you think education and correcting misinformation are somehow demeaning: far more patronising imo for middle-class policy wonks to push flag-waving racist dog-whistles at ‘working class’ people.

4. Labour has repeatedly swerved giving any structural or critical account of the situation the country is in: with the financial crisis, with austerity (until the JC years), with Brexit, inequality, and now with Covid-19. They literally don’t bother to correct wild untruths.

5. And why not? For fear of actually engaging people’s intelligence and capacity to learn about things that perhaps they hadn’t thought about before. UK Politicians talk endlessly about ‘aspiration’, chiefly of a financial kind. Why isn’t critical thinking aspirational?

6. Evidently it serves the Tories to keep people ignorant of the many ways that the economy is geared around helping the rich get richer and to foment the scapegoating of immigrants for societal problems. Failing to push back against this only hands more power to the Tories.

7. As ever, I don’t know how to end this thread. I’m just howling into the void (again). Labour under KS are back to being wildly complacent and intellectually cowardly/flabby while the Tories go on with vast corruption and the slow but steady erosion of the welfare state.