Petrified fucking terror. That’s the first thing you think when you look at Labour. A barely-concealed, buttoned-up, can’t-sleep-at-night anxiety, lurking just behind the eyes. They’re scared they’ll fluff it. They’re scared that in the white heat of the election campaign, the Tories will find some policy in their manifesto to weaponise against them and the whole thing will come crashing down.
If labour win with a large majority they need to fucking use it.
Get some laws repealed get better ones passed and for god sakes look at proportional representation the country is crying out for it
If labour win with a large majority proportional representation
If Labour win with a large majority, and I quote, “Now is not the time to be making radical changes to our parliament what we need is three to four full term parliament’s with which to improve the country under a Labour government”… they’ll kick it into the long grass.
They are no fans of PR if it means a majority. Neither are the Tories. And round and round we go!
Personally I think PR is the single most important thing that we need to achieve if we ever want any progress in this country. We can’t keep having this choice between the Tories and the party people vote for to keep the Tories out.
Maybe there needs to be a single issue party that needs to exist to apply pressure, like ukip did with Brexit.
Not even maybe.
We need two parties, a left wing PR group to pressure Labour, and a right wing one to pressure Conservatives.
It will let them argue the point that it’s beneficial for each side of the room without getting bogged down with playing the tie colour game.
Labour have never won a national election that I was able to vote in. So this is all a bit…odd to me. I’m firmly in the ‘any labour government is better than a Tory government’ camp, and I know that makes me a bad leftists but it’s the truth.
That said, I hope to god they don’t waste this opportunity to do something that changes Britain for the better, because if we go back to the Tory’s again after four or five years I’m not sure what we’ll have left to save.
Bad lefties are the ones who insist that what they are personally comfortable with is the only thing that is acceptable.
Incrementalism sure is dull and boring, but the downside of governing with consent is that you have to meet people where they are.
Yep. But funny how meet people where they are. Means shut the fuck up to a lot of center right proponents.
Holding our nose and voting to end tory rule. Really dose not mean we need to tolerate the anti left ideal of some of the parties right.
I voted for Corbyn for leader twice. 2017 was better than I could have imagined, but we still lost. 2019 was the worst thing I have ever seen. We gifted the Tories a massive majority led by a fucking clown, and lost our heartlands in the process.
England - and it is an English problem - votes along very conservative lines. The Tories have been in power for something like 70% of the time since 1900. We have a media which is overwhelmingly right wing, and even the mainstream left-leaning paper is disowned by “the left”. A Labour government is a hard won rarity, precisely because the labour movement, and class consciousness, has taken an axe to the face since Thatcher. We have an electoral system which massively inflates the power of Tory votes.
Nothing would make me happier than waking up one day and finding that the electorate suddenly supported the values, and economic system, I support. But that isn’t where we are, nor was it where we were under Corbyn.
To suggest this is purely the result of infighting, or blairites, or whatever Other you choose, is to miss the point and avoid having to face the reality that we lost, badly, because we didn’t offer something the many would vote for.
Nothing would make me happier than waking up one day and finding that the electorate suddenly supported the values, and economic system, I support. But that isn’t where we are, nor was it where we were under Corbyn.
This is the main point when it comes to electoral politics. I didn’t support Corbyn but I was a big Ed Miliband fan (we do exist). In 2015 it became abundantly clear that most people just don’t see things the way I do!
To suggest this is purely the result of infighting,
And no one did that. I just pointed out that whwn the right of the party attacks the left with such vitriol. Its hardly there fault that they criticize them.
Labour was set up as a left wing party. Unless you are somehow going to argue that support for “labour” IE workers is not left of centre. Yet throughout the Corbyn years the attacks were on the left. To the point actual members and employees of the party fought on the other side. Right wing labour MPs formed competing parties. While right of center members accused the left of wanting to remove the right for them to run as MPs.
Yet non of these things has been done by the left. While the right is actually banning left of centre MPs.
The post I replied to tries to blame everything on bad lefties. I am not argueing they dont exist. Of course they do. But the simple fact is so do bad actors from the right of the party. And those actors have done more harm during the corbyn years then any lefty is doing now.
PS fully agree its England. Even those of us in England know this. But the labour party not advocating at all for the value of the left.
As for not offering any polices that sell. Utter rubbish nationalising rail was a huge popular policy. So were many more. Before the antisemitism attacks. Labour was gaining hugly in the poles. Yes I to think it went to far in 2019. And Corbyn seemed out of touch. But to argue that the left of the party offered nothing so we can ignore it bnow. Is just ignoring the reality of his popularity at some points during his leadership.
Starmer is not in anyway popular. His achivements atm are3 about 90% tory hate not starmer popularity. How is that going to go when the torys have3 been out for a couple of elections and regroup into a Cameron like party. The right has always been more then able to hide when they think it is needed. Unfortunatly the extream left less so.
The post I replied to tries to blame everything on bad lefties.
No, my post is saying that everyone on the left - including the centre left - who fails to get elected are bad lefties. That is literally the sole purpose of a political party.
The ultimate aim of the Labour Party is to change the economic system of the UK to a socialist one. This is the case even with clause 4 being removed. But that can’t be done it you don’t get elected. And to get elected you need to be as left wing as you can, but still get 50%+1 seats. That is the hard bit we have routinely failed at doing since 2010, with leaders from all wings.
They won the first couple I got to vote in. We got Blair sigh.
I found this bit striking:
The ultimate plan is to fully decarbonise the grid by 2030. The previous target was 2035 and most people in the sector thought it would be very challenging. 2030 is close to impossible. It suggests that Labour is going to put the country on a war footing.
So, even with what many people, me included, think is an overly cautious programme, Labour are promising something that… might be physically impossible.
Really good point here, though [emphasis mine]:
Similarly, tearing up the planning system is free. If you are heavily constrained in one area but have set yourself a requirement to achieve a very ambitious target in another, you are likely to opt for the options still available to you. Increased prices at subsidised auctions, on the other hand, cost money. But they fall within the fiscal rule, which allows borrowing to invest.
It’s why spending isn’t everything. Labour always get hammered for suggesting spending money, so they need to be radical elsewhere. This sounds promising.
An interesting peak behind the curtain and some cause for… what’s that feeling called again? “Hope”? Nah, it’ll not catch on.
considering they spent all day attacking suella’s speech from the right…
Ian dunt? One of the toriest “labour” idiots around here.
Lol that is such an Ian Dunt headline. It writes itself.
There’s literally no way to know what a Labour government will be like. All we know about Starmer is that he’s prepared to lie and say whatever he thinks he needs to say to get power.
Was he lying to the left to get selected? Or is he lying to the right now to get elected?
🤷
Even to whatever extent they have described any policies at all, they’re probably just lies.
Still. The mystery prize will indeed be better than yet more crazed Tories. I suspect just not all that different.
You can easily guess what a labour government would be like by looking at what starmer has done so far, what he has said so far and who he has explicitly taken inspiration from.
I’ll save you some googling: he’s a Tory with a labour scarf on. More Tory than most Tories.
Not hard to extrapolate from there.
