UK Politics
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A lurch? It's a tectonic shift!
They've not been a left wing party since Kinnock, except for the brief Corbyn years. This just seems like a return to Blairite business as usual.
Clearly not a popular opinion on the internet but.... Blairite business as usual is actually winning elections and getting a chance to enact reforms as opposed to preaching to the choir with no influence.
I really do hope we get over this idea that if you're not a direct descendant of Arthur Scargill himself then you're some sort of right wing pariah. Starmer (or Blair / Brown) might not be to people's liking but they're far from the right wing nutters we have had in power for the last fourteen years.
I hope people are realistic and understand that we need at least a parliament to put into place plans to undo the damage the Conservatives have done. Nothing is instant, nothing is cheap.
Edit: Freudian typo.
It amazing that this "you might not like him, but suck it up to get rid of the Tories" attitude wasn't present when Corbyn was leader. No, it was an endless tide of infighting, coups and splintering. How are we suppose to take these pleas to get rid of the Tories seriously after watching the Labour Right do everything in its power to hand the Tories the last two elections?
A Labour leader needs to appeal to more than simply the hard line left crowd in the Labour party. Corbyn was never electable outside of North London and a handful of university campuses. Not in any serious way at least. That's why he got battered in both elections he contested.
Labour need someone that appeals to their party (or most of it) plus they need someone that appeals to voters outside their party. Corbyn night have done the first, but he failed miserably at the latter. Blair did both crushingly well. I hope Starmer does both (but he's trying his hardest to fuck up both parts).
I will agree with you that the public infighting within Labour didn't help. But I don't pretend that Corbyn was the right candidate for a Labour government.
I can't agree with this. He was vastly popular in a lot of areas, I'm very much not a londoner and well out of university and heard a lot of support.
The thing to realise I believe, is that most voters are easily swayed and not vastly invested. That leads to an environment where whoever the tabloids like gets in regardless. Tabloids are mostly run by very rich people who are never going to support wealth taxes, closing of loopholes, restraints on business, etc.
If the Sun, Mirror and Daily Mail put out a front page tomorrow saying they were supporting the green party then they'd get in.
Popular doesn't relate to electable. Corbyn's 2019 election decimation would suggest to that.
I also don't believe that the electorate is that stupid to be swayed by newspapers. For sure, there's stupid voters - I get that. But I think most people didn't connect with his vision for the future which was essentially "we'll be your best friend and not Tories". It was a bit wishy washy which didn't connect with the electorate.
His stance (non stance) on Brexit was also a massive failure of his administration. He wanted to be everyone's Brexit friend - friend of leavers friend of remainers just lend him your vote and pretend it didn't happen. Labour massively shit the bed with the Brexit question. Incoherent and lacklustre policy.
But 2017 saw the biggest labour swing since 1945, which is way more than Blair managed. That's very electable.
Not sure how you can diminish the newspaper influence either, it's pretty well documented. If you talk to the average person they don't know the policies at all.
But they still lost. Talking academic numbers is fine for student learning. But they lost. And in 2019 did they capitalise on that swing? Oh no they lost again! And badly.
Perhaps it was unfair if me to diminish the influence of the papers. I just don't buy the narrative that it was all the rotten newspapers fault. Corbyn just was not a good figurehead for Labour to be winning elections. And he certainly wasn't what we needed during Brexit. Just imagine what a stronger opposition could have done to prevent it from ever happening. That's squarely on Corbyn.
You realise someone always loses right? Losing an election doesn't make someone unelectable.
I can see you support Blair and as a result Starmers copycat act, but there's many times in the past where a left wing party has been in power in the UK and many countries where the left wing are in power now. You don't HAVE to be moving to the right to get in power.
Losing twice, the second time the worst since.... what was it.... 1935? It literally is the definition. How many times do you need him to contest the GE?
I'm realistic. I'm also more inclined to vote centre ground of politics rather than far left or far right. And it seems the rest of the UK electorate are like that too. Otherwise you'd have had your Corbyn government by now but you don't. I would rather a left leaning centre ground party like Blair's or like Brown's or hopefully like Starmer's than the misery we have at the moment.
On a wider point, we simply don't have the electoral system to allow for a party like Corbyn's anywhere near government. If you feel passionate about a Corbyn government you should feel passionate about PR and push your MP to introduce a vote on changing our system over to that rather than the constant rather fruitless narrative of us vs them.
Regardless of feelings on Corbyn, everyone in the UK who cares about democracy should do this.
Not true at all, we've had progressively further right parties for years. You can't compare the current tories to John Majors.
These are hardly far right parties. Yes they are right of John Major (well Truss Book are, Cameron not so much) but the framing that they're far right parties is wrong and misleading.
If parties are too extreme one way or the other the electoral won't vote for them. That's my point.
I was enthusiastic to see Corbyn in power but then it came to the general election and they kept announcing one ambitious thing after the next. I was largely in favour of them but I was still thinking "what are you playing at?" as they'd have cost a fortune and there was no evidence of where all the money would come from. And if I thought that, it's no wonder other people were scared off.
The money would have come from Old McDonnell's farm of course! Selling eggs from the community chicken Co-op that is fed from grinding up the bones of the rich. Obviously 🙄...
Those do sound like mighty fine eggs.
I really don't get your position. You keep asserting that Starmer is "electable," but here you acknowledge that his action are alienating to both people within the party and outside of it.
The only thing Starmer has going for him is extreme luck. If Boris hadn't fucked up Covid so bad and made the Tories so unpopular, I doubt Starmer would have the capabilities to win this election.
I think I've been saying in all these posts that Corbyn in unelectable rather than Starmer is electable. 😂😂.
I do wonder, given it was "antisemitism" that finally sunk Corbyn, how he'd do now. Critising Israel is no longer a problem. Infact large segments of society are calling for a far more critical stance on Israel and its actions.
It would have just been something else. Antisemitism is just the one that stuck, but if that hadn't worked they would have kept trying to put people off one way or another.
As much as Corbin had decent ideas, his handling of the press was abysmal
To me, Corbyn's problem was being too nice. When the party needed an old fashioned Stalinist purge of Blairites he made the arch Blairite his Brexit secretary.
When Blair purged socialists from the party he rejected calls for Corbyn to be expelled, because he didn't consider him a threat, you should always learn from your opponents' mistakes.
He had quite a lot of problems. Most seemed to stem from the way that he seemingly seemed to side against the West in any international dispute, which is suboptimal in a prime ministerial candidate. Those views also led to him sharing platforms with some questionable people.
Yeah and in a similar vein he's a huge contrarian in a huge number of areas - it seems like if he didn't have a strong opinion on something he just went against the status quo on it regardless of how illogical that was, which in my opinion at least is a pretty poor trait for someone who literally has control over the status quo