Labour Leader: Keir Starmer IV
- Thread starter droodzilla
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Seeker_UK
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans
Well one could argue that New Labour ideals whilst not as left-wing as many would like them to be, would offer a better alternative to the current government.
Gosh, we've been here before. What's more important: a Labour Party that's more left-wing and closer to the ideals of its founders or a Labour Party that can defeat the Tories? Whilst they are not mutually exclusive, is more years of Tory Government worth it before it becomes the latter, because it's not going to be a winning approach in 2023/4.
Tony L
Administrator
Yes. Exactly. Our system is designed very carefully to remove all votes from anyone other than the governing Tory elite and a largely controllable token opposition, Labour. All other votes are literally binned at a local level. As an example, much as I hate it, Farage’s xenophobic UKIP party took something like 4 million votes in one election and got no seats/MPs at all. It only takes a few thousand to return a Tory MP under FPTP.
Green voters exist in fairly large numbers, as they do across the world, but are bright enough to grasp they can’t win in an non-democratic playing field. If we had PR I’d expect the Green vote to treble overnight. I vote Green purely to register my vote in national voteshare. I fully understand I am disenfranchised and voiceless. I will never have political representation under the current system.
I bet there is. Shall we start a competition for who is the most working class?
I was brought up in a working class household but I cannot deny that I am middle class now. Social mobility is a good thing.
What has Corbyn ever actually achieved? Starmer has risen to the top of the legal profession which is really demanding, he has more brains in his little finger than JC is every likely to draw on.
I don’t hold a particular candle for Starmer but I admire what he has achieved. Labour members had the opportunity to elect Burnham & they chose not to.
JensenHealey
pfm Member
Errr.....Wilson? I seem to remember he was quite the thing back in the day. Not quite working class origins though - up to Oxford and all that. But, Tea and Sandwiches at No. 10 for Union Leaders?
Maybe there is a clue buried in here. All the Labour leaders of today are part of the whole champagne/North London/Oxbridge and Lawyer set. Hardly representative to the working class they claim to work on behalf of.. and hardly likely to understand anything of their actual lived lives. Especially up in that grim North. And anyway - there isn't much 'working class' left. The remaining low paid in this country are not in large scale manufacturing industry represented by Left Wing Unions - who are the sole sizeable financial donor left to Labour. Modern day low pay is in the gig economy - a fair bit of which is 'temporary' and not a career. Other low pay in caring and hospitality - but again not a basis for a labour movement.
It has been said before, Britain needs a moderate left-cum-green party of strength, but not based on the historic Labour party. Other countries seem to be managing it - perhaps Labour has to cut Union funding and connections to forge such a path, or a whole new entity has to rise. Shades of Barbara Castle and Roy Jenkins again...?
droodzilla
pfm Member
Sure.
Happy to have a nuanced discussion about what Blair got right, and what went wrong.
Happy to have a nuanced discussion about what Corbyn got right, and what went wrong.
I'm not willing to engage with cheap point-scoring.
Most people don't know what Johnson is. He is the cheerful chap off the telly that managed to got brexit done, sorted out the vaccinations better than other countries, and is going to level up and improve things round here rather than down south. No idea what those whining lefties are on about and wouldn't trust them anyway to get the job done.
None of the politically disengaged I chat to around here is aware of how unusual our current government is compared to previous conservative and labour governments. They can obviously see the effects of covid but don't tend to see the structural changes and the causes of them which will prevent a return to normal never mind growth for the 99%. When they do start to feel it in perhaps 12-24 months time the current tentative conservative support will be withdrawn.
Despite the factors against them (disgraced local MP, strong remainer replacement, UKIP collapse, modest turn out, etc...) the Hartlepool result still has a labour vs conservatives largely two horse race. The large number of "need to think about it" voters have still largely gone to the two main parties. This is about the only positive I can see. If labour don't start getting their act together and their status falls even further the not-conservative vote is likely to start going to the larger protest parties like the libdems and the greens and then we are in trouble. Even with votes for the conservatives falling they will still get in if the bulk of the votes doesn't transfer primarily to a single opposition party.
droodzilla
pfm Member
Because Burnham ran a shit, timid campaign. He's more confident in his core beliefs now and has openly repudiated some of what happened under New Labour (he's on record as saying that some of his more progressive ideas were undermined my MPs on the right of the party).
paulfromcamden
Baffled
The London Assembly elections have an 'additional member' system so incorporate a form of PR. Eleven PR seats up for grabs out of a total of 25.
Each election has resulted in two or three Green seats and one or two UKIP/BNP seats.
I suspect this is at least partly down to people not understanding the system and still believing a Green vote is a 'wasted' vote.
Seanm
pfm Member
Why do you assume that people haven't tried to learn from it? I have, and offered you ungrateful lot the fruit of my learning, but all I get is the usual dismissal because "Blair won three times!" I won't bother again except to say: this ain't 1997.
Quick reminder that we are talking about *Hartlepool* and the Blairites have *just lost* what the left have won twice in the last four years, once with a thumping majority. They lost it partly by having that ghoul Mandelson parade around town with his meat puppet of a candidate. Now people are listening to his explanation for what went wrong? Incredible. This is a uniquely bad time to argue that we need to put aside lefty ideals and channel Blairite pragmatism!
SteveG
pfm Member
In Scotland a lot of people (including me) will vote Green on the regional list while voting SNP for their local seat. That does make it difficult to work out how much support the Greens actually have i.e. how many green voters vote for another part in their local seat, and how many supporters of other parties vote for the Greens on the list instead of the party the primarily support.
It is one potential downside in the PR system that Scotland has, as there can be quite a bit of tactical voting going on - especially from SNP supporters who vote elsewhere as their list vote would probably be wasted. Good news for the Greens though.
It is one potential downside in the PR system that Scotland has, as there can be quite a bit of tactical voting going on - especially from SNP supporters who vote elsewhere as their list vote would probably be wasted. Good news for the Greens though.
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
Freeport’s don’t so much create jobs as displace them from other areas.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
They're also outside the juristication of uk law (employment, tax etc)
ks.234
Half way to Infinity
GK Chesterton said that when a man stops believing in God, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything. This seems true. As traditional religious observance has declined, so belief in Scientology, crop circles, tree hugging and various cults has grown. Something similar is happening to politics. The political system has failed many working people and has been failing them for decades to the point that they’ve lost faith in the established political parties. But people have not turned their back on politics, instead they’ve put their faith in people like Trump and Johnson who have created an image of go-getting Mavericks.
They're not Mavericks of course, they’re the very epitome of establishment privilege, greed and deceit, but we’re in a post truth world where just as people turn from God to the nonsensical, politics is in the hands of the non political
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
“Undemocratic, outside the tax system and protectionist with big benefits” for the VIP lane clients of Johnson’s party, sucking value away from legitimate, tax paying companies in the rest of the region.
wylton
Naim and Mana member
I'll come clean and say that whilst I consider myself to be a socialist, I've never been much of a supporter of Labour; they've never really been progressive enough for me tbh. An effective opposition would be a good start, but Labour don't even seem to be able to be that. I hate the Tories with a vengeance & I'd hate to see a decade of them in power, but that's where we're heading right now. The Labour party is so broken, that its difficult to see how they can turn things around. Its all very well talking about Greens etc, but there would have to be a huge swing away from Labour in order for any other party to form an opposition, let alone a government.
To quote from the Labour web site:
"The Labour Party was formed out of the trade union movement to give working people their own political voice."
They seem to be a mile away from that right now. There must be a path that gives people a voice, has a social conscious & is progressive enough to allow society to develop for the good of all of it's citizens. The lack of enough good social housing, the severe under-funding of the NHS, social inequality, the sale of our publicly owned companies, mostly abroad, I could go on; where are Labour on these issues?
The voting system doesn't help; in our area, any vote other than Tory is a wasted vote. Don't even get me started on the Liberals (or their latter-day alternative)- what a waste of time they are! The opportunities they have squandered! Most of their problems have come from poor leadership.
To answer @paulfromcamden 's question, maybe Clement Attlee? He was before my time, but an elderly friend is full of praise for his leadership.
To answer Paul's other question, defeating the Tories is an important ambition, but I hate this namby-pamby centre-ground politics that everyone seems to aspire to.
With respect to the accusation of @Woodface of me not wanting working class people to better themselves, I come from a very poor background and my parents did their best with the little they had. I have been fortunate enough to be able to be able to take advantage of higher education and have earned good money in my time, but even those opportunities are being eroded now.
It's really difficult for youngsters these days; even having a good, well paid job doesn't help you to get somewhere decent to live. The over-reliance of the private sector for rented accommodation and the skyrocketing prices of houses to buy, even if you manage to save a deposit! I realise now, how luck I have been.
The swing away from Labour in the North of England, is difficult for me to understand tbh. I assume that people feel let down or else they have been won over by the promises that things will get better. The deindustrialisation of the UK must have had a massive impact in terms of employment, so growing the green economy is obviously something that Labour must take on board if they are to have any chance of getting back into power.
Moderate is the wrong word given that significant structural changes are required to current wealth distribution and flows and to some extent social cohesion. Radical is also the wrong word since it implies major change based on faith. The right word I think is rational. A political party needs to be up front about the reasons why our economy and society is increasingly unstable and declining. Then to present a rational way forward to a more stable system. It will attract vehement opposition from current wealthy beneficiaries because significant wealth taxes are now inevitable given how skewed the distribution has become relative to income as will shifting more of the tax burden back towards companies and away from individuals because this has also gone way too far. Not necessarily back to historical levels but enough so that the health of a company and the health of it's employees and operating location become more strongly correlated. If a reasonable job can be done educating people about how things work it should attract healthy support but it first requires politicians to want to act in the interests of their constituents in major structural ways.
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