Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
This is roughly the reason I've just switched my vote on this poll from Phillips to Starmer. I think this year is going to be chaos. Johnson is going to fail to deliver on something significant, and the Tories are going to start looking like the self-interested shower of incompetents we believe them to be, but in a way more visible to more of the voting public.Labour need to understand they have a massive battle ahead and whilst Starmer might not be the ultimate victor, he might be the one who can lead them out of the wilderness. I know Seanm may see my support for him as proof that he’s a centrist, but I’m sure that some of the Northern areas can be brought back into the fold when the promised sunlit uplands don’t appear. A cogent alternative has to be there. A bit of nationalisation great, take back the railways as the opportunity arises. Prove that the national companies are better, then look for other areas. Joint ownership and workers rights, brilliant, those are areas that may soon seem important as divergence from the EU develops. The NHS of course. Stick to that, don’t throw everything up at once, it scares people, and it’s not deliverable. Anyone who’s led anything knows that the status quo is easy, the difficulty is managing change. People are terrified of it unless there’s something very tangible in it for them. That’s why privatisation went well for Thatcher.
I don’t see any of the others being able to what’s necessary and persuade a bitter and divided country to vote for the party.
What Labour needs, if this comes to pass, is somebody calm, competent and consistent. A rock people will come to believe they can rely on. That would go a long way to planting the idea that Labour is electable. We don't need innovative policies, or groundbreaking initiatives, because with the current Tory majority, it would all just be piss and wind anyway. So hold your fire on that, and concentrate on repositioning Labour as a party of competence. That means somebody like Starmer, who is capable of looking like a stabilising influence while all around is going to shit. He might not be the one to lead the party into the next election, or the one to develop the innovative social reform and left-wing initiatives, but that's not what's needed right here right now. What we need is a helmsman who can hold the current course in a storm. Starmer looks like the most likely candidate for that.