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Labour Leader: Keir Starmer VII

Down against a remarkably small Tory percentage too. No one is winning a GE with those stats. Good!
Probably so if that is still true in 2 1/2 years time.

I think now would be a good time for centre left MPs to form a new party. We’re going to end up with another tory govt anyway so a new party may as well start building now and aim for 2029. There won’t be much left though.
 
Down against a remarkably small Tory percentage too. No one is winning a GE with those stats. Good!
Hard to see the good in it tbh. I guess it might make things harder for the anti-union hardliners in charge of the party but who knows/cares.
 
Might be good if it led to a Labour/Green coalition but would the Greens really want the reputational damage of getting into bed with Labour?
 
Might be good if it led to a Labour/Green coalition but would the Greens really want the reputational damage of getting into bed with Labour?
Not that I like polls, but the Greens are looking like getting 1 seat. It’s a truly pointless party at this moment in time.

We need an electable centre left party or the move back in a left direction can start only with Labour.
 
Good to see Corbyn opening his big gob again today.
That will soon restore the Tory lead.
I think if you have popular policies, solid support from your base and a workable strategy then success really shouldn’t turn on an ex-leader saying and doing exactly what he’s always said and done.

Labour have prioritised other things so they’ve made themselves a hostage to fortune. But really, if Corbyn saying what everyone knows he thinks is enough to derail the Starmer project, how shit at politics are these people?
 
Good to see Corbyn opening his big gob again today.
That will soon restore the Tory lead.
The Tories will win the next election. Starmer might pick up one or two Tory voters pissed off with Johnson, but the recent leadership contest shows that love for Boris is still strong. An economic crisis might go against the Tories, but Labour seems to have painted itself into a corner on spending and will face the usual jibe that you can’t trust Labour.

What Corbyn says will make no difference.
 
The Tories will win the next election. Starmer might pick up one or two Tory voters pissed off with Johnson, but the recent leadership contest shows that love for Boris is still strong. An economic crisis might go against the Tories, but Labour seems to have painted itself into a corner on spending and will face the usual jibe that you can’t trust Labour.

What Corbyn says will make no difference.
The gospel according to yourself and (my good friend...LOL) @Seanm is Labour can’t be trusted. That is what you two are ‘campaigning’ on and have been for some years now, is it not? Labour should be burned, etc...
 
The gospel according to yourself and (my good friend...LOL) @Seanm is Labour can’t be trusted. That is what you two are ‘campaigning’ on and have been for some years now, is it not? Labour should be burned, etc...
I was referring to the usual Tory jibe that Labour cannot be trusted with the economy. The fact that Labour is now indistinguishable from the Tories on the economy will make little difference come the next GE. If Labour does campaign on anything different to the Tories, and I presume they’ll have eventually come up with something by next election, it will be hammered on how they will fund it.

I might be wrong, maybe the Tories will hand Starmer a free pass on the economy, but I somehow doubt it.
 
Starmer's ban on front-benchers atttending picket lines has become another self-inflicted wound:

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...strike-lisa-nandy-visits-picket-line-in-wigan
“Unhappiness on this is very widespread on the frontbench,” the shadow minister said. “It is not just on the left. Unions are where most people on the front bench have come from – or [they have] worked in unionised industries.”

A third shadow minister said Starmer’s advisers “did not get it” and said they had failed to register the widespread public support for fair pay. “This is not an ideological battle with hardliners – it’s not 1996,” they said. “This is working-class people being driven to food banks by inflation and bosses getting bigger pay packets than ever.”
Maybe anti-union grandstanding to appease the right-wing press isn't such a great idea, after all.
 
I was referring to the usual Tory jibe that Labour cannot be trusted with the economy. The fact that Labour is now indistinguishable from the Tories on the economy will make little difference come the next GE. If Labour does campaign on anything different to the Tories, and I presume they’ll have eventually come up with something by next election, it will be hammered on how they will fund it.

I might be wrong, maybe the Tories will hand Starmer a free pass on the economy, but I somehow doubt it.
If Labour is truly indistinguishable from the tories then the jibe doesn't work anymore.
 
If Labour is truly indistinguishable from the tories then the jibe doesn't work anymore.
It’s not a jibe though, I genuinely fail to see where Labour is different to the Tories on their economic plans. If you are seeing something I am not, then happy to discuss it without jibes
 
The Tories will win the next election. Starmer might pick up one or two Tory voters pissed off with Johnson, but the recent leadership contest shows that love for Boris is still strong. An economic crisis might go against the Tories, but Labour seems to have painted itself into a corner on spending and will face the usual jibe that you can’t trust Labour.

What Corbyn says will make no difference.

If Labour is truly indistinguishable from the tories then the jibe doesn't work anymore.

It’s not a jibe though, I genuinely fail to see where Labour is different to the Tories on their economic plans. If you are seeing something I am not, then happy to discuss it without jibes
I referred to it as a jibe because in your post I was replying to you referred to it as a jibe.

I fail to see the core ideology of the Labour party as being indistinguishable from tory ideology. My observation of the UK govt between 1979-1997, 1997-2010 and 2010-2022 suggest to me strongly that Labour and conservative are not the same.

I’m interested in a whole lot more than the fact every political party in the UK signs up to the same tax/spend/debt political narrative. There are differences between all of the parties outside of that.

Regardless of the issue of taxes and spending, Labour will spend differently to the tories irrespective of people understanding economics and where the money comes from.

Can you explain where the two will spend the same on the same things and with the same priority because that isn’t what previous evidence of each in govt shows to be the case.
 
I liked Polly's article in the Guardian yesterday, made sense imo :-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/02/labour-power-keir-starmer

I wasn't impressed with this:

[Truss's] low-tax bidding war leaves no money. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has exploded the fantasy that tax cuts bring growth. If so, the IFS says, why have countries with higher tax than ours, such as France and Germany, achieved higher growth?

Obviously whether tax is high or low the government can issue as much currency as it needs to in order to fulfil its spending needs. There will not be 'no money' left. That is shear idiocy.

Or this:

But is it wise for Labour to spend billions buying these back, before spending on them or anything else? As Reeves’s team pointed out, rail is effectively state-owned already. Pragmatism means super-tough regulation can do more without wasting a penny. Southern Water is imposing hose pipe bans while reportedly leaking 21m gallons a day. Who wants to pay its owner, the investment bank Macquarie, who loaded it with another £1bn debt while its CEO earns £14.8m? England’s water regulator, Ofwat, warns that rising interest rates will see some water companies go bust – that needs state takeovers.

The government will not lose any spending capacity if it buys back utilities from the private sector because it is not constrained by currency issuance. It is a simple question of what is best for the population, nationalised or privatised utilities? Her advocacy for state takeovers only of failed companies is reminiscent of the nationalisation of the past and is insufficient. If the government feels that Southern Water has been acting deplorably (there is a lot more bad stuff than this) then they can take ownership with the purchase payment massively discounted to cover for what Southern Water have done wrong. If the final amount is below current shareholder value and the bankers aren't repaid in full then so be it.

Or this:

Charging VAT on private school fees would bring £1.7bn for state schools

It wouldn't bring one penny for state schools. It is not necessary to be a burden upon private schools in order to adequately resource state schools. The government can give

every child the experience of arts, sports and expeditions

without having to take it off rich people to pay for it. It can do it simply by giving schools the budget so that they can provide children with those experiences.

And of course, Toynbee is offering stuff on behalf of her New Labour masters but of course Starmer has already decided that he will be making arbitrary controls on spending which means he does not have any wish to make a material improvement in the wellbeing of the population.

So after being at the forefront of the campaign to stop Corbyn being elected she is now trying to get Starmer in the top seat. The cynic in me wonders who is paying her. This article is a feeble attempt to sell a politician's phoney promises when a half decent journalist would challenge the contradictory nonsense that he is allowing himself to be represented by.
 
It’s hard to see Toynbee as acting in good faith here because she knows very well what the people involved are like: she knows that they’re ideologically committed to privatisation, it isn’t simply that nationalisation isn’t a priority; she knows that they’re ideologically anti-union, it isn’t just that they’ll worried about optics etc.

Superficially everything she says in the article is reasonable and supports an eminently reasonable narrative - keep a lid on it lads, we’ll get to the progressive stuff once we’re in power - that is very popular with reasonable left wing people - provided they don’t know what the Labour right are actually like. Once you do know what they’re like it’s impossible to buy into this narrative: it really is the soft left’s Sunlit Uplands.

I’ve said it before and I won’t get tired of saying it: the primary political purpose of the Guardian is to keep Labour members uninformed about the right wing of the party. This article is a prime example of the kind of obfuscation this requires. It’s really very cynical. Consider this passage:

All of Labour backs the fight to prevent massive cuts for those whose pay fell or stagnated for a decade. Strikers stand for everyone, the un-unionised are pulled up by union rates. But Starmer is not wrong to think that a convincing government-in-waiting shouldn’t be seen as protesters: parliament is their forum. Labour shadow ministers gnashed their teeth over the picket line grandstanding of Sam Tarry, who reacted to the prospect of being deselected in Ilford South by claiming, “I am on the side of ordinary British workers”, as if the rest weren’t. Mick Lynch is a great advocate, but the shadow cabinet has a more complex task than he does.

The party’s position, as a senior Labour official tells me, is “100% behind the right to strike” and “to make sure workers get the pay they deserve”

Anyone reading that would think “all of Labour” is pro-worker and pro-union and that is just not the case. Any writer committed to informing their readers would at least admit that *some* people in Labour (many of the people in charge, as it happens) are keen to get shot of the unions.

Toynbee’s article needs to be read in conjunction with this brief New Statesman report, which acknowledges the right’s antipathy towards the unions:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/labour/2022/08/keir-starmer-picket-lines-lisa-nandy

And ideally also this deep dive on the Labour right:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-923X.13015

Again, I’m not saying it’s not a good idea to replace the Tories with Labour, but let’s not kid ourselves that the avowed right wingers in charge will become more radical over time, once they’re in government. The opposite is more likely.
 
On the Labour right's anti-union stance, here's John McTernan (former advisor to Tony Blair), writing in The Telegraph in 2016:

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There's a nice story about the above piece in the leaked Labour document that prompted the Forde Inquiry:

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There are plenty of people like McTernan in the Labour Party - Christ knows why.
 
This post is nonsense. Wherever the government is a country's sole currency issuer then the insights of Modern Money Theory apply. That means UK, USA, Canada, Australia, etc.

In theory MMT can apply but it hasn't been applied in practise (per my answer to doctorf's pertinent question). The UK and USA are currently seen as neoliberal by Team MMT (as is the EU). I assume Canada and Aus would be seen in the same light.

PS Why do you call yourself Super Bigote?
 


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