I'm sorry but I'm just going to have to stick up for a 'fellow boring person' here
, do you honestly think the country as a whole would embrace 'radical', most people fear change do you not think radical change is just a step too far, I know we've got Brexit which is probably the most radical thing we've done, but I think that came about due to peoples complacency that something so radical could never happen ?
It's a good question! My own gut feeling is that most people are comfortable with "radical" when it's something they agree with. So the difference between a Corbyn Labour government and Brexit is that the latter was at once both vague yet simple to grasp - you could vote against how things currently are, but at the same time the way in which Brexit was sold during the referendum meant that everyone could feel that there was a solid chance of getting the version they wanted at the end of it. Whereas with the former you've almost got the opposite problem, in that there were plenty of specific issues with Corbyn and Labour and the left in general already floating around for people to immediately balance the things that they might agree with against. I think that's why you get that weird thing where polls of what's actually in Labour manifestos show that individual policies are generally very popular, but once you group them together in a pamphlet and stick a red rosette on it people go "ah, well, if it's
Labour doing it...". This might be part of why, across many Western democracies since the financial crisis, it's been easier for right-wing parties to move left on economics than left-wing parties to move right on culture.
As an example: Corbyn and his shadow cabinet weren't totally against triangulation, and one area in which they were actually to the
right of both Theresa May and Boris Johnson in the 2017 and 2019 elections was police and crime. Labour's manifesto offered much higher police funding, as well as a number of other reforms that were based on the idea that more police = lower crime. But, of course, it never really got much attention in the press because it was unbelievable that a Home Office under Diane Abbott would be more pro-police than even the most liberal Tory administration, and all it did was make the people who did actually notice it - activists who care about police violence, like Corbyn himself was for so many years - angry at the sell-out. If your whole brand is radical authenticity, then there are infinite ways to piss people off by betraying that brand. Meanwhile Michael Gove has publicly admitted to doing cocaine, and his daughter is filming herself smoking weed on Tik-Tok every other day, but his wife can write in the Mail/he can give speeches about how cannabis is dangerous and it's still received as sincere and authentic by many people.
As long as the Tories are implicitly viewed as a pragmatic party which only sensibly alters the status quo in line with "common sense", no matter how radical Brexit is it doesn't
feel as radical, especially to a voter base which sees the EU as something which itself was the uncomfortable, radical change (most Leave voters were old enough to remember the UK before entry into the Common Market, after all). And I guess that does count as complacency in a way? But whether it's impossible for people to have been complacent about the ramifications of Brexit and then to remain indifferent (or at least not passionate enough to fight for or against it in some way through participating in civil political organisations) is not something I'm sure is impossible, or even unlikely.
