More like "this man will ensure we have over a decade of the most moderate labour government in history".
Effectively all he will do is completely split the right. Reform will be where your reactionary Mail types go, the Conservatives will be where your "sensible" but still firmly right wing middle class boomers go, and Lib Dem will be where younger "progressive" centrists go.
Labour will have huge mandates but have very little focus, because their entire position will be to maintain the broadest appeal to the lowest common denominator at all costs. They could achieve a lot but it's a complete toss up what that will actually be.
I live on a council estate and drive a van for a living. Not quite the middle class Guardianista you were aiming for, but It does amuse me how frequently people make this kind of misapprehension just because I can use fancy words.
>>101124 Yeah, where does he get off having a go at a proper, salt-of-the-earth kind of newspaper like The Mail. Where else is he going to get lectured about why private schools shouldn't have to pay VAT by women who've shagged Boris Johnson, be openly mislead and lied to about the nature of reality itself, all while keeping up on the latest celeb gossip? Besides The Telegraph, I mean. Or The Express. But other than that?
In all seriousness, if you need help getting Paul Dacre's cock out of your mouth visit the NHS's 111 website for advice.
>>101094 I don't like Jimmy much, but comparing a merchant banker with a few million to his name who worked his way up, and might borrow the odd propaganda piece from the same playbook as the Nazis to compare refugees to a human swarm as part of an attempt to justify tighter borders, is not the same as a lunatic apartheid billionaire trying to take control of an entire country and openly supporting football hooligans with far right sympathies and AFD.
He might actually just be a free speech absolutist/autist who thinks it's wrong to arrest people for nasty words even when they're a ringleader for thuggery and violence, rather than a Nazi. He might even be more to the centre than Jimmy. He wants more Indian workers in the US. But he's far nastier with or without the racism. He's a loony.
>>101138 I don't understand why you're making distinctions like this. The men of which you speak don't make them amongst themselves in any meaningful way, nor do their acolytes. They are, presumably, your ideological and class enemies and will destroy your whole world regardless of how precisely you define them. If a soldier sees an enemy tank rolling towards him, he blows it up. He doesn't stop to count the rivets to see if it's a model E or F first.
I know Farrage and Musk have had a spat. However, this isn't the kind of intercine bloodletting you might see in left-wing circles. If and when it suits them both the disagreement will be dropped in an instant, because the ideological framework for rightist dominance-politics is far looser than anything on the left. West coast tech magnates are quite happily operating alongside blood and soil Christian nationalists on the other side of the pond, and neither faction is questioning what stange bedfellows they, on the face of it, make. It's the same reason pointing out hypocrisy in right-wing politics is considered old hat: basically, they don't give a shit.
>It's the same reason pointing out hypocrisy in right-wing politics is considered old hat: basically, they don't give a shit.
Exactly. Look at that Vance guy. I like him about as much as a urinary tract infection, but he has raised some valid points; it's just that the reason he's making them are completely insincere and hypocritical. And the most annoying part about that is that pointing it out does absolutely nothing.
Bottom line is they don't need to be consistent or principled, because they're not fighting for any true ideology, they are only advancing their own interests. As long as those interests align, (which they do because "making more money and removing as many legal, ethical and regulatory obstacles to making more money" is a pretty broad goal), they will cooperate. The problem the left has is that it's actually trying to fight for a principle, so they can't shapeshift anywhere near as easily.
>>101141 One has the fear of his voters, who want him to be a bit of a cunt to migrants but don't want a strongman loony
The other is a loony with no regards for political processes or democracy whatsoever. There is a real distinction in practical terms.
We are not about to be run over by a tank; this is a politics discussion, and it helps to figure out the differences, or is at least interesting to do so; they want quite different things and OP is a pathetic troll so it's fun to puncture his ego.
>>101147 their voters care about hypocrisy, or at least, the fear of being seen to be hypocrites; they want to be Right; plus they also want a consistent message; there are quite a few right wing circles with asignificant uptick in doubts at the minute and even some GOP loyalists in Congress are raising concerns, if quietly because they are still trying to find their spines; if there was no infighting among spectating groups who supported him, then you might as well pack up the free press on the Left now because it's their job to point it out and they've been doing it all the past two weeks (in the US).
>>101740 There has been very little mention of the local elections where I live, because I live somewhere where no elections are happening. I think we could see a fair few Reform councils, and lots of thinkpieces about that, followed by them winning no seats at the next general election. That's my prediction.
>>101741 I think it's mostly county councils, which means it's shire councils in England, and mostly Tory councillors. Many of the seats were last contested in 2021, where there was a bit of a Boris Bounce after everyone's favourite bumbling schoolboy successfully led the country out of a time when there was this really bad cold going around. Tories went in today with almost 1000 out of the 1600 seats. Losing around 200 would be a correction, 300 would be a bad day, 400 would be a bloodbath, 500 would see calls for seppuku.
>>101742 Well, it's only been a little over 100 seats so far, and I'd say we should expect this year's Tory conference to include an announcement of yet another leadership contest.
>>101750 Labour doesn't have any problem with this result. As a rule sitting governments perform poorly in locals while its seen the opposition vote split 3-ways which would allow Labour to comfortably win the next election and see the possible implosion of the Conservative Party with defections.
Of course now Labour has no real need to court the left vote and can try to push unpopular policies.
Based on current polling, Reform would win the next general election. They'd be 81 seats short of a majority, but could very plausibly go into coalition with the Tories. Some kind of merger, hostile takeover, mass defection or pre-election pact is within the realms of possibility, which would make things even more difficult for Labour.
Runcorn and Helsby was a very safe Labour seat - Mike Amesbury won 53% of the vote last year, with Reform in second place on 18%. Obviously that by-election is against a backdrop of weird circumstances, but it shows that Reform can deliver huge swings even when Labour are their only real competition. It would be lovely for Labour if Reform just split the Tory vote, but that's not what's happening - they're taking similar numbers of Tory and Labour votes. With the collapse of the Tories, this is much more dangerous for Labour, because the Tories just don't have many marginal constituencies to defend.
Opinion polls are not elections and there are still all sorts of ways that Labour could win things back or Reform could fuck things up. With that said, Labour are in an incredibly precarious position right now. They need a huge change in fortunes just to cling on as a minority government, let alone securing a workable majority.
>>101752 Labour taking the left for granted will be what kills it. About 27-32% of voters, about 8 million people minimum, can be assumed to be loyal to Labour. If you accept the conventional (lazy) electoral theory that Labour lose because they're too left wing, a 3-ish way split with the lib dems sucking up moderate Tories suggests that even a loony-left Labour leader could win just by merit of being Labour leader.
Only a fool would take that as carte blanche to act like a Tory leader: you're gambling that solid 8 million people will put up with active betrayal, in the hopes that people who didn't vote for you last time will swing your way this time. That's a reasonable gamble if you're Tony Blair looking back at 1992, it's a deranged one if you're Starmer looking back at 2024.
You can look at Scotland for what happens when someone comes along and offers center-left voters a way out. You can even do it twice since voters actually started drifting back to Labour due to the SNP now taking them for granted, only for Labour to get in down south and remind everyone why they defected to the SNP in the first place.
Now I'm not going to sit here and boost the Greens, or a Corbyn vehicle, or any other optimistic left scenario. I don't think they're going to do that well. But it only takes a few lefties to go green, a few poor people to decide it's not worth their time to vote, and a few social liberals to go Lib Dem to cause what was a solid Labour win with 25% of the vote to become a historic death-spiral inducing defeat with 22%, and "but you'll let in Savile by vote splitting!" only works if they don't think you're already basically Savile.
>>101746 A thousand pardons, Sir Mr Starmer, Sir. I'm trying to not be dolescum anymore like you asked me to, but that means I can't go to Runcorn for a jolly or they'll make me even more of a dolescum as punishment.
>>101752 If Labour carry on regardless then they, and us, and also me because I'm a member, are totally fucked. Polling behind a party with 6 MPs is not normal, polling within a few percentage points of the previous government that you beat in a general election less than a year ago is not normal. The population of the UK are approaching a state of wholesale nihilistic disdain for any and all "politics", which I put in quoatation marks because it's been a ghastly simulacrum of actual politics for decades now. We could probably argue the toss over exactly when that started, but the point is people are sick to the back teeth of uninspired managerialism. Not for irrational reasons either, but because it's been a generation since anyone felt as if a national government even wanted to improve their material living standards, let alone believed that one would do so. If you make The State an opponent of the people, instead of their ally, terrible things start to happen like Andrea Jenkyns becoming the Gauleiter of Greater Lincolnshire.
>>101755 >That's a reasonable gamble if you're Tony Blair looking back at 1992, it's a deranged one if you're Starmer looking back at 2024.
I think it must getting on for a decade ago that I was saying how ridiculous it was that many politicians were still behaving as if we were living in the world we had before the Great Recession. Behaving as if nothing had changed since then, nor that they needed to change in return. Now I think they aren't ridiculous, but that they are actually quite thick, and that much of the world of politics operates along fractional lines little more developed than those you'd have found yourself subject to back in secondary school. However, perhaps this is simply how my own nihilism is displaying itself, but I'm simply too proud to admit that I, like the pretend politicians, have given up. Then Burial plays over some rushes of the City of London or something.
>>101752 >Labour has no real need to court the left vote and can try to push unpopular policies.
This feels like odd phrasing, given how left-wing policies overlap so closely with unpopular policies in this country.
>>101755 I can tell you're going to come at me for that above quip, so I probably need to launch a first strike.
>(lazy) electoral theory that Labour lose because they're too left wing
But it's weird how Labour keep losing when they're too left-wing, isn't it?
>even a loony-left Labour leader could win just by merit of being Labour leader.
They literally tried exactly that and got annihilated. Twice, if we go back to Michael Foot.
Labour are unpopular now, but they always said that was going to happen as soon as they won last year. Everything is going exactly according to Labour's plans, which doesn't necessarily translate to better lives for all of us, but Reform will need to move a bit left to stand a chance in a general election, and as soon as they do that, Labour can cynically steal their ideas like the Conservatives used to and the Daily Express won't even be able to complain about those policies this time.
Since Labour took power. for most people, the most noticeable thing they've done is take away the winter fuel payment from most oldies, and have announced they're going to fuck over most people on PIP.
The left-right dichotomy has always been bogus, but we could pretend that it meant something when we had a two-party system - left and right could be conveniently defined in terms of whatever pisses off the other lot. Voters never really thought in those terms, but they were forced to pick a side.
At the last election, the Greens and the Lib Dems made huge gains from the Tories. Ellie Chowns came from fourth place to demolish a majority of nearly 25,000 in North Herefordshire. The Lib Dems won seats like Chichester, Cheltenham, Tunbridge Wells and Stratford-on-Avon. Again, the left-right dichotomy just completely fails to explain what's going on.
>>101757 You are misreading the point: For argument's same I'll concede that only ~30% of people will vote for "too left wing" Labour. When the Tories are polling 35%, that means you lose and have to move to the middle. On current polling Michael Foot would win a landslide with 27% of the vote. Risking losing that 27% when your opponents are on 22% each, in an environment where you are widely disliked and unlikely to win them over, is a hell of a gamble.
My personal theory of elections is that leadership matters and policy is mostly irrelevant. (As a general rule) And that since ~2019 UK elections have almost no relationship to any genuine voter desire, instead being the product of a dysfunctional press meeting dysfunctional parties. (A theory borne less of Corbyn's loss - which was overdetermined - more of everything that's happened since.)
Some cunt I don't know on the radio put it quite well.
Labour came in with the tried and tested old method of getting the difficult and unpopular but necessary stuff out of the way up front and first, in the assumption that you can bring your popularity back around again by the next general election. Where they have gone wrong is that they failed to read the room and understand just how pissed off people in general are, and how much of a looming threat the populist right is in a situation like this.
Which all sounds pretty obvious to us, as people with the ability to see, hear, and think. But politicians need a bit of a kick up the arse before they twig, don't they.
For my part I think the political class and establishment as a whole has severely and fundamentally underestimated one thing. The way in which social media, and the ubiquity of internet discussion, has impacted political engagement and people's overall perspectives. They don't realise that we have undergone a complete and full on paradigm shift in the time since the Conservatives won in 2010, and their eventual collapse in 2024. The lessons weren't learned because at the end of the day, and despite all the turbulence of events that should have been a radical upheaval like Brexit and covid, the same dysfunctional party was somehow still able to limp on a good four or five years past its sell by date.
I think the Conservative party is dead on its arse, like, literally they are a party we will soon be talking about in the past tense. But Labour really needs to pull its thumb out of its arse now or else they will be too, and who's going to fill their shoes? Sure as fuck won't be the LibDems, much less the Greens.
Today I overheard two gaunt drug addicts near city centre agreeing with each other about "all them fucking foreigners coming into the country and ruining everything".
No offence, but what kind of ruin are they possibly going to bring to people like that, who have already done their best ruining themselves. You're on no high horse here.
>>101762 Frankie Boyle did a joke on that.
Maybe they're professional beggers and their usual patch is no longer profitable, due to immigrants. Uncharitable or something, I don't know.
They did seem like drug addicts. Or alcoholics. Or both. Something about their jerky movements and the slightly incoherent way they were talking to each other. And their appearance of self neglect.
Punching down at the lumpenprole isn't a good perspective. Consider that competition and precariousness in the labour market is at an all time high, and while that's not the fault of immigrants, they are in no uncertain terms part of the contributing factors in creating it. Consider that if we had a more stable and secure labour market those two drug addicts you saw might not be drug addicts to start with. Homelessness and addiction all too often comes about as a spiral after being laid off and then evicted. You are probably only a couple of missed pay cheques away from it yourself.
If the materialist argument doesn't do much for you then how about a bonus woke one. Consider that cosmopolitan liberalism is in itself almost always a byproduct of colonialism and imperialism. The enrichment of the imperial core that allows the tolerant liberal democracy to flourish to begin with nevertheless disenfranchises the workers, both native, immigrant, and indeed overseas in the sweatshops and factories we offshored.
This is the kind of chauvinistic attitude towards poor people that really bridges the horseshoe between the woke liberal and the conservative right.
Most of the Big Issue sellers around me are Eastern European, so I can totally see why a couple of junkies would be pissed off at the foreigners on their patch.
>>101766 >Consider that if we had a more stable and secure labour market those two drug addicts you saw might not be drug addicts to start with.
This is the argument I always use. People are worried about immigrants, because their lives are so shitty that a family of 15 illiterate Somalians could genuinely make their lives noticeably worse just by existing. Rich and happy people never vote for Reform. It's the same immigrants, but rich and happy people really aren't that fussed if their taxes get spent on putting 40-year-old Abdullah and his 35-year-old son in a Premier Inn for a couple of months. The key isn't anything to do with immigrants; if we could make all British people rich and happy, we wouldn't have to care about whether Abdullah was a refugee or an immigrant, because it wouldn't matter.
Even as a white British drug addict, you can get help on the government. You neither have to stay unemployed, nor homeless, nor a drug addict. There are government and NHS schemes and programmes for every single one of those needs. It's not like you're thrown out on the street because the government prefers to blow everything up your arse as an immigrant and you get zip if you're a white Brit. But different marginal groups of society have different needs. Those Somalis, if there is a case that they are here legally as refugees or whatever else applies, need a roof over their heads first and foremost. And if a local council can't provide other accomodation, then it could actually be, all cost considered, that it's cheaper to house two Somalis in a budget hotel room than building more housing for them.
Nobody is worse off because of immigrants, in that sense at least, and nobody should scapegoat them and call them responsible for your own personal misery.
>Even as a white British drug addict, you can get help on the government. You neither have to stay unemployed, nor homeless, nor a drug addict.
The government has remarkably little duty of care to most homeless people. If you're an adult in reasonably good health and you aren't looking after any children, then the local authority is likely to deem you as not having a "priority need". This means that they're obliged to help you, but they aren't actually obliged to provide you with accommodation.
In some parts of the country, that isn't much of a problem, because there's a good supply of social rented accommodation; in others, particularly London and the South East, not being in priority need means being put at the bottom of a decades-long waiting list.
Surely you can just get on a Megabus and pitch up in a town where there's loads of cheap housing, right? Not so fast - the local authority only has a duty to provide homelessness support to people who can demonstrate a "local connection". If you haven't been living in that area and don't have any close family there, the local authority don't have to do anything to help you.
What about finding your own rented accommodation? You're entitled to claim housing benefit, but there's no statutory entitlement to help with the cost of a deposit. You could apply for a discretionary housing payment, but as the name suggests, they are under no obligation to actually give it to you; even if they do, it can take weeks for them to process your application.
It's true that most long-term homeless people have complex needs that make them unable to maintain a tenancy - usually some combination of mental illness, drug and/or alcohol addiction - but the safety net provided for homeless people is much more threadbare than you'd probably expect if you've never had to use it. Some councils do a brilliant job of preventing homelessness, but the legal minimum level of service that they have to provide is really very poor.
>Even as a white British drug addict, you can get help on the government. You neither have to stay unemployed, nor homeless, nor a drug addict. There are government and NHS schemes and programmes for every single one of those needs.
I'd love to live in this parallel version of Britain you are imagining here, but I am sorry to have to break it to you that it's not the real one we do live in. I can only shake my head when I hear this kind of shit. You really think it's that simple, you just go to The Government and go "Sorry to be a pain old chap but I'm a bit homeless, any chance of a free house? Oh and I've got a spot of heroin addiction, so if you wouldn't mind giving me some rehabilitation, counselling and support for that too, that would be ever so terribly good of you."
I don't want to believe you are really this detached from the real world and how things are nowadays, nor do I want to strawman you as some posho who has only ever had theoretical experience and knowledge of such things from reading the papers and internet drivel, so I have to believe you are knowingly lying to yourself.
Nobody is saying that, and I don't think anybody who's homeless will expect something like that. It'll be more like, I'm a bit homeless, is there a way to get some semblance of a firm roof over my head so that I'm not getting shit on by pigeons while sleeping on the park bench in the rain every night.
You obviously don't realise how many hoops there are to actually jump through, or how overstretched the services on offer already are. You think these cuts to services we are hearing about all the time nowadays are only affecting superfluous shit like pony grooming or something. You don't realise there's people out there in our society who are at the sharp end of it all, not getting what they need.
You feel comfortable to decide it's their fault they can't just sort themselves out, because after all, the government will help. But the government often just simply can't or won't, not like it did 10, 20, 30, years ago. Things have changed. People struggle to even get GP appointments, let alone dentists, let alone referral for mental health services. Nevermind housing.
You have to construct this narrative in order to dismiss those people as thick, or as lazy, or as somehow otherwise deserving of whatever their situation is. That's the chauvinism I referred to before. The common ground between the wokie and the Mail reader is that they both hate the white native lumpenproletariat more than any other group, and this is always their basic means of justification, exactly the same for both of them.
>You have to construct this narrative in order to dismiss those people as thick, or as lazy, or as somehow otherwise deserving of whatever their situation is.
Fuckssake, lad. Again, nobody is saying that, and neither am I.
On the other hand, teh gubmint can't make you leave your homeless, jobless, drug addicted existence behind. All they can ever do is offer help. And it has nothing to do with chauvinism to realise that.
>The common ground between the wokie and the Mail reader is that they both hate the white native lumpenproletariat more than any other group, and this is always their basic means of justification, exactly the same for both of them.
>teh gubmint can't make you leave your homeless
Nobody is saying that! (Pretend I said that in a spazzy voice to make fun of you.)
>All they can ever do is offer help
Yes, and you never know, if it was more accessible, and had adequate funding, more people might actually use it.
>it has nothing to do with chauvinism to realise that.
It does though. Your premise is that they don't want to put the effort in. You presume to know their intentions and speak on their behalf.
