advertisement


Next Labour Leader: Keir Starmer

Status
Not open for further replies.
During which time we'll keep getting the kind of leaders you identify as damaging for the UK. It surprises me that although you clearly dislike what's going on with the country, you seem prepared to accept 'collateral damage' while you struggle to get something perfect? It just makes it very easy to caricature this as an example of 'ideological purity and dogma' over 'pragmatism and 'realpolitik'.
How on earth do you draw that conclusion from what I wrote? I will vote against the Conservatives - whatever it takes to keep the bastards out. An occasional moan about Starmer on an obscure forum doesn't make me an ideologue.
 
The obvious answer is to compare the vision and boldness of the 2017 Labour manifesto with the weakness and timidity of the 2015 manifesto (sadly, Ed Milliband did not trust his soft-left instincts and was unduly influenced by the right of the party).

For example?
 
As someone who gets labelled ‘hard left’ and ‘far left’, it means a fairer society and a commitment to public services. The fact that such an idea is now ‘far’ left demonstrates how far to the right politics have shifted

Does commitment mean money? And, how do you define fairer?
 
How on earth do you draw that conclusion from what I wrote? I will vote against the Conservatives - whatever it takes to keep the bastards out. An occasional moan about Starmer on an obscure forum doesn't make me an ideologue.

Apologies but you talked about a long-term project to change things and I had assumed (!) that meant you would prefer Labour to pursue that to the exclusion of getting someone in on the back of being portrayed as 'electable' in the popular press (which at the moment is something you have to do to win at 'the game'). Whether it makes you an idealogue or not doesn't matter. If what you state can be misunderstood by me, it'll happen elsewhere (or worse be misrepresented) as I'm sure you don't limit sharing these views to an obscure forum.
 
"Something strange is happening to British politics. The super-rich are calling for higher taxes on their wealth – and 64% of Conservative voters agree. Polls show that only 12% of people want to go back to the “old normal”, and there is no appetite for further austerity. Even the Conservatives are borrowing Roosevelt’s clothes, dismissing the idea of spending constraints as “dogma” by which they are “unencumbered”. Austerity politics seems to be well and truly dead.

The only people who seem to have missed the memo are the Labour party."

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ch-conservatives-calling-higher-taxes-starmer
 
"Something strange is happening to British politics. The super-rich are calling for higher taxes on their wealth – and 64% of Conservative voters agree. Polls show that only 12% of people want to go back to the “old normal”, and there is no appetite for further austerity. Even the Conservatives are borrowing Roosevelt’s clothes, dismissing the idea of spending constraints as “dogma” by which they are “unencumbered”. Austerity politics seems to be well and truly dead.

The only people who seem to have missed the memo are the Labour party."

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ch-conservatives-calling-higher-taxes-starmer
Yes. Politics is moving. Labour is standing still.
 
You forget that May was riding quite high until May 2017, when her net approval rating was 10%, more or less the same as Boris Johnson's before the 2019 election. It certainly wasn't vastly different:

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politic...esa-mays-favourability-score-plummets-new-low

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/boris-johnson-approval-rating

It's true that there was a dip in May's popularity in the run up to the 2017 election but, according to the article above, this was largely due to Leave voters losing confidence in her. This supports my assertion that, had May been able to say (convincingly) in 2019, "Get Brexit Done", she could have easily won a majority. I'm 90% certain she would have, given the mood of the country.

Of course May's popularity nose-dived after the 2017 election, and the rest is history.
May was so unpopular with voters that she had 42% SoV. Corbyn supporters never stopped going on about his 40% share.

From memory May had the biggest share since Thatcher in 79.

You can spin this a number of ways & I think most of them have been covered;)
 
The Conservatives knew that some were sickening of the seemingly unrelenting and endless Brexit juggernaut. I think they sensed that this disgruntled and growing minority just needed a nudge. Their whole campaign was to convince this minority to take the risk and their risk would encourage others to do so.
They kept the campaign lean and clean using the repetition of the slogan to drive people forwards. Domestic issues were discarded. They avoided anything that may pollute or corrupt their single aim, hence no controversial interviews etc. It was blunt, immoral and very effective. The confusion and chaos in the Labour Party provided a boost and the Cons. were first over the line a large margin. Where they are now I expected but it was a bold move and people were suckered to be honest, they probably couldn’t believe their eyes.
For the first time in many years Labour have a chance of wrestling back the ground that they lost.Starmer is dry, serious and perhaps pedantic but I think that’s exactly what they need at this time. Some nibble at him now but if he pulls this off what will they say then....I think he is underestimated and I’m pretty sure he is spending his time sorting internal tensions and shaving off those that may prove a hindrance as they did before(RLB). The crap he has to wade through at this time must be monumental.
I think you’ll find some people here do not think it was a single issue ( brexit ) election.
 
"Something strange is happening to British politics. The super-rich are calling for higher taxes on their wealth – and 64% of Conservative voters agree. Polls show that only 12% of people want to go back to the “old normal”, and there is no appetite for further austerity. Even the Conservatives are borrowing Roosevelt’s clothes, dismissing the idea of spending constraints as “dogma” by which they are “unencumbered”. Austerity politics seems to be well and truly dead.

The only people who seem to have missed the memo are the Labour party."
We don't know if they have missed the memo or not because those in control are quite sensibly saying almost nothing at the moment. However, the shrinking of conservative support and the growth in labour support has tailed off in the last few weeks which is perhaps surprising given the scale of the harm the current government has been responsible for and seemed to be picking up blame for. I would have expected the swapping of support to continue until labour was comfortably ahead. Obviously there is more harm coming to the general population in the next few months and years with the growing impact of mishandling the virus, the growing impact of brexit, and the never seen before levels of UK government incompetence.

A significant proportion of the super-rich have been calling for higher income taxes for a while because they are increasingly worried about the pitchforks coming and since they avoid paying tax effectively paying proportionally more on what they do pay is not going to hurt them much or lead them to be taxed at anything like the rate of the squeezed middle in real terms. In many ways it is something of a red herring for labour because the UK is in increasing strategic trouble and fixing it requires not only stopping the haemorrhaging of wealth to the unproductive wealthy but also recovering a substantial proportion of the wealth that was misdirected towards them over the past 40 years or so and particularly in the last 10 years. Such a tax on wealth will need international cooperation but is the opposite of the current direction of travel for the UK with things like brexit, seeking to build on being the centre for the world's corrupt wealth,... This dominates all other labour policies because without it there will be no funding, no recovery from growing economic downturn or a return to a more equitable share of generated wealth like there was in the period from post war to the 70s. I would suggest that labour/Starmer's position on this is pretty much the only thing matters and we simply don't know yet if he is going to go to war to fix our growing economic instability, and it will be a war given the resources of those currently benefiting unreasonably, or abstain supplying neutral support in the manner of Blair and Brown.
 
I see Nandy managed to attack the Tories from the right at the weekend - that takes some doing

She said Begum’s return was “a real problem” and “the blame for that lies squarely at the Conservative government’s door.”
 
This is an interesting piece comparing Starmer with Roy Jenkins 60 years ago. Since my comparisons with the past are so often rubbished on here, this is what rightwing, mainstream Labour was like - principled (in some respects anyway) - not the pale imitation that we have today...

"Labour will win by changing minds – not pandering to rightwing voters"

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...r-changing-minds-rightwing-voters-roy-jenkins

Remind me what happened to Roy Jenkins (by some way the best Home Secretary in living memory).
 
This is an interesting piece comparing Starmer with Roy Jenkins 60 years ago. Since my comparisons with the past are so often rubbished on here, this is what rightwing, mainstream Labour was like - principled (in some respects anyway) - not the pale imitation that we have today...

"Labour will win by changing minds – not pandering to rightwing voters"

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...r-changing-minds-rightwing-voters-roy-jenkins

Didn't Corbyn say Labour had won the argument and rewritten the terms of political debate after the 2019 general election?
 
Going well for our leader.

"A more fruitful strategy for Boris Johnson at prime minister’s questions might be damage limitation. To accept that Keir Starmer is far brighter, better prepared and more obviously sincere and try to dead-bat his way through the half-hour with short, anodyne responses. It might not be the rallying cry for the Tory troops that he would like to give, but it would sure as hell be better than being comprehensively owned by the Labour leader week after week.

But Boris is temperamentally incapable of such an act of self-preservation. His natural instinct is for destruction, both of himself and everything around him. So while Starmer is The Daddy, Johnson is visibly regressing in front of our eyes. When he first became PM, he would act the adolescent: Kevin the teenager. Then he slipped back to the grumpy 10-year-old. Now he is like a toddler barely out of nappies. At the current rate of progress, his baby son will soon be reading him bedtime stories.

What’s more, it appears Boris either is unaware of his decline or believes it to be of little consequence. Or possibly both. He may even be right for the time being. After all, most people aren’t paying much attention to his weekly half-hour of humiliation, he has an 80-seat majority, and an election is four years off. Yet his lies and tantrums still have the power to corrode. And few prime ministers have done more to undermine democracy than he has."

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...or-with-no-clothes-and-its-not-a-pretty-sight
 
Going well for our leader.

"A more fruitful strategy for Boris Johnson at prime minister’s questions might be damage limitation. To accept that Keir Starmer is far brighter, better prepared and more obviously sincere and try to dead-bat his way through the half-hour with short, anodyne responses. It might not be the rallying cry for the Tory troops that he would like to give, but it would sure as hell be better than being comprehensively owned by the Labour leader week after week.

But Boris is temperamentally incapable of such an act of self-preservation. His natural instinct is for destruction, both of himself and everything around him. So while Starmer is The Daddy, Johnson is visibly regressing in front of our eyes. When he first became PM, he would act the adolescent: Kevin the teenager. Then he slipped back to the grumpy 10-year-old. Now he is like a toddler barely out of nappies. At the current rate of progress, his baby son will soon be reading him bedtime stories.

What’s more, it appears Boris either is unaware of his decline or believes it to be of little consequence. Or possibly both. He may even be right for the time being. After all, most people aren’t paying much attention to his weekly half-hour of humiliation, he has an 80-seat majority, and an election is four years off. Yet his lies and tantrums still have the power to corrode. And few prime ministers have done more to undermine democracy than he has."

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...or-with-no-clothes-and-its-not-a-pretty-sight
This might be true, but does yer average Joe voter watch PMQ’s or read the Guardian? Yes, Starmer performed well yesterday, but if you look at the 6 o’clock news, it suggested a draw and it’s not exactly front page news.
 
This might be true, but does yer average Joe voter watch PMQ’s or read the Guardian? Yes, Starmer performed well yesterday, but if you look at the 6 o’clock news, it suggested a draw and it’s not exactly front page news.

It's not that the public watches it's that being petulant and out of your depth has limited shelf life. It gets party activists, sketch writers and others talking about something other than the opposition leader not being up to it. It has a corrosive effect that wears thinner over time. The slack that a PM gets given initially soon starts to tighten.

The "average Joe" may not follow this, but the effects of less sycophantic coverage and increased criticism that builds for a struggling leader does result in coverage that is much wider. Nobody should over-estimate PMQs in isolation and I'm not. But nor should you underestimate the negative effect on someone who can't hack it week after week. You can see he would rather be anywhere else, not a good look. BBC News coverage is a travesty as their idea of 'balance' is one shot each. A whole different problem.
 
It's not that the public watches it's that being petulant and out of your depth has limited shelf life. It gets party activists, sketch writers and others talking about something other than the opposition leader not being up to it. It has a corrosive effect that wears thinner over time. The slack that a PM gets given initially soon starts to tighten.

The "average Joe" may not follow this, but the effects of less sycophantic coverage and increased criticism that builds for a struggling leader does result in coverage that is much wider. Nobody should over-estimate PMQs in isolation and I'm not. But nor should you underestimate the negative effect on someone who can't hack it week after week. You can see he would rather be anywhere else, not a good look. BBC News coverage is a travesty as their idea of 'balance' is one shot each. A whole different problem.
I do hope you’re right, Johnson’s bluster and waffle was always a thin veil covering an obvious lack of substance.

I tend to absorb my news from a variety of sources, but like watching the BBC 6 o’clock news to try to gauge what is going on ‘out there’ rather than just what’s going on in my bubble. I go to my ‘man in the pub’ to hear what’s being picked up in the real world, which does mean I have to drink beer too. Such a shame.
 
PMQs could well have a corrosive effect over the next couple of years, the Cons Party will not let it go on too long & will probably oust him.

Performing well at PMQs certainly does no harm so it’s rather silly to discount these early wins from Starmer.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.


advertisement


Back
Top