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Labour Leader: Keir Starmer VI

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It's not "sometimes" is it. That's the logic of the system and nobody needs it to be pointed out. So you've got to ask why it's pointed out all the time, in response to quite specific points, that have nothing to do with purity or perfection, and when the question of voting hasn't been raised and won't be of any practical significance for years to come. While we're at it we can ask where pointing this out all the time has got us. We might also look at very recent political history and ask why it only seems to apply to the left.
It doesn't apply only to the left. I'm sure many UKIP voters have felt forced to vote tactically in past elections, and reluctantly voted for those wishy washy conservatives.
 
So what. They poured money into health and education. Good enough for the ordinary man in the street but not for some.


In Blair’s own words one of his major goals was wealth creation, he had Brown and others for that social welfare stuff.

Whilst he (New Labour) was heralded as Thatcher’s biggest success, again her words, he enabled much more “levelling up” than this current fascist/corrupt/morally bankrupt charlatans ever will.
 
I’d like to see a proper shared ownership program whereby social housing is built & tenants gain an increasing stake over time. We are wedded to home ownership as a status symbol & it’s difficult to break this without proper intervention.

Ultimately property inflation is a supply side issue. I don’t really consider it free money as I have paid a lot of interest over my mortgage.

Until the Tories are kicked out nothing will change, even slightly.
 
It doesn't apply only to the left. I'm sure many UKIP voters have felt forced to vote tactically in past elections, and reluctantly voted for those wishy washy conservatives.
That might have been true for a while, but you won't believe what happened next.
 
It doesn't apply only to the left. I'm sure many UKIP voters have felt forced to vote tactically in past elections, and reluctantly voted for those wishy washy conservatives.
There is an important political constituency, which I won’t name for fear of causing offence, who certainly feel the lesser-evil logic doesn’t apply to them. During the last U.K. election some of their most famous politicians went on television to persuade people not to vote for their own party, despite the obvious consequences of Johnson winning. Their political pundits discovered a previously unknown option on the ballot paper: the “hung parliament”.

I think after decades of being told to suck it up and get behind the lesser evil, the left now have answers to two of their key questions: Where’s that going to take us, long term? And, Is this deal reciprocal?

None of that answers the larger question of what to do about the fact of limited options. But I feel like it’s time to stop indulging people who answer every criticism of the opposition with lesser-evil finger wagging. It’s passed from the pompous and obvious to the ludicrous and embarrassing. They need to acknowledge some basic aspects of political reality.
 
In a system as limited as ours we need a full spectrum on the ballot ticket. The Tories need to be free market capitalists, the Liberals a centrally located liberal/social democratic representing small businesses etc, and Labour socialists/trade unionists representing the workers. Labour deciding they want the patch immediately to the right of the Liberals has broken the whole thing.

I blame Labour for breaking the whole thing as whilst the Tories have shifted right into the world of alt-right popularism and even Trumpian conspiracy theory they are still at the right/authoritarian end of the map where one would expect them. The Libs are in their box too, though Labour leapfrogging over it means they are now well to the left of Labour in many respects (human rights, civil liberties, democratic reform, anti-nationalism etc). Labour are just not where they need to be and that has tipped everything to the right. Their core job is to produce a coherent left of centre option on the ballot paper. That they don’t do it can’t be blamed on the other parties.

Again Scotland proves beyond any doubt that a well argued left of Labour argument can win, and win to the point of slaying the two headed beast of Westminster. Corbyn almost got there, but was wiped-out by such a spineless and evasive Brexit non-strategy that pleased no one. The rest of the manifesto had some traction.

My point is no one can blame the Tories or the Libs for being where they are. They are where one would expect bar the Tories moving rather further right to Trumpton. Labour are the ones in the wrong place, and by being in the wrong place there is no ‘left’ option on the ticket that can win in England. The Greens are better in every respect, but they can not beat a system designed to exclude them.
While I agree with much of what you say, I see Labour more as being pulled to the right by the massive gravitational pull of Liberal economics that have been in existence for three or four times as long as Labour. To pin the blame on Labour for the impact of liberal economics is a bit like blaming an asteroid for gravity. Yes, Labour has agency where an asteroid does not, and no one is more disillusioned than me that Labour has not stood by it’s core principles, but Labour is not the problem.

The problem is the black hole that sucks all social good into itself and leaves behind just private profit and rampant individualism of which Trump and Johnson are inevitable consequences.

We cannot look to Labour to restore the balance. Labour got sucked to the other side of the balance as far back as Wilson’s prices and incomes policy, and finally lost their grip on the right side of the see-saw with Callaghan’s acceptance of all things Milton Friedman.

Any weight to the other side of the balance will have to come from a reframing of the economic debate. It is the language of tax and debt that sucks social provision out of the economy leaving only that rampant private individualism. We need to free government spending from the constraints of revenue, we need to change the language of deficit into the language of investment, and we need to change the idea of debt from a private asset into a public asset, and from a social cost into a public utility.

If we can change the language of debate, we might then be able to lend weight to a politics based on human rights. A politics in which human rights and protecting the planet are the number one purpose of economic activity. If we can honour the human right to a job and a home and decent health care, and better education, we will have a much better balanced, and more moral, economy.

So while I agree that everything has been tipped to the right, trying to balance it with more of the left is, I fear, doomed to failure without a total rethink of economics, a rethink that should appeal to Tory One Nationism, the Liberalism of The Greater Good, and For the Many Not the Few in equal measure, but not using the language of any, using a new language and a new understanding of what is needed to save the moral and political good and to leave us with a planet on which to enjoy it
 
In Blair’s own words one of his major goals was wealth creation, he had Brown and others for that social welfare stuff.

Whilst he (New Labour) was heralded as Thatcher’s biggest success, again her words, he enabled much more “levelling up” than this current fascist/corrupt/morally bankrupt charlatans ever will.
The gap between rich and poor widened under Blair
 
So what. They poured money into health and education. Good enough for the ordinary man in the street but not for some.
Blair did put more money into health and education. Unfortunately he also introduced academies and PFI, the very agents that have dragged our Health and Education to the crisis point they are in now.
 
The 40 year house price boom was most probably an accident to begin with - an unexpected byproduct of deregulating the mortgage market in the early Eighties and at the same time eliminating price controlled housing - council, sitting tenant rights, rent controls etc

Regardless the impact huge new piles of free money for home owners had on the economy and on our politics was soon apparent and all parties have essentially adopted house price inflation now as core strategy. They all feign to worry sometimes but actually hunt down ways to keep it going, mostly by avoiding building enough houses. Economists ignore it because they' have no interest in inequality, only total GDP, and they long ago convinced each other that asset price inflation is "just" a zero sum game (ultimately it is but it gives before it takes away and the gap can span decades).

Politicians chose to read the phenomenon as proof their other economic ideas were miraculous. You could pick whatever you wanted to. Thatcher credited free markets without unions, Gordon Brown called it An End to Boom and Bust (he also had in mind securitisation another miracle that wasn't). Others have credited everything from globalisation to net migration, to a nice clean service economy, to the dot com miracle, to the EU, to insert the hobbyhorse of your choice. Such things are hardly irrelevant of course but fundamentally what was going on was a free money train for property owners. A train so stuffed with cash it made absolutely everything look good. Just add zeros to house prices and rents. Getting rich effortlessly has never been easier. Interest rates were collapsed to keep the train rolling, QE was invented when we ran out of interest rate, Stamp Duty holidays became routine. And all kinds of government subsidy has been rolled using borrowed money to pay house builders, housing benefits and the governments own massive new and growing rent bill (PFI).

So you could say this has not only caused massive inequality, it's massively distorted perceptions of how our economy is actually working. It's made making money so easy people stopped believing poverty was real, widespread, involuntary and growing. But that's just the compound difference between having a home that isolates you from inflation while adding huge piles of equity to your wealth and being trapped renting one that exposes you to inflations full effects. It's two completely different planets.
 
Brown took his eye off the ball. RBS being a wonderful example.
Brown swallowed the consensus thinking of his time: he created the Financial Services Authority to keep an eye on the banks. The FSA, whose Chief Executive of the time was John Tiner, took its eye off the ball. A good article on quite how misguided the FSA were can be found in The Guardian. It says that all regulators everywhere missed the crash
Guardian said:
In 2006, reflecting the mood of the time, Tiner said: "Firms' managements – not their regulators – are responsible for identifying and controlling risks. A more principles-based approach allows them increased scope to choose how they go about this. In short, the use of principles is a more grown-up approach to regulation than one that relies on rules."
And if you'd like to read more about John Tiner, try here.
Guardian said:
His tenure certainly coincided with a very light-touch regulatory regime. "A lot of the stuff about the [investment] industry being the FSA's clients and it being there to help came from him," said one former colleague. And Tiner prided himself on his principles-based approach, setting out the framework for regulation rather than imposing detailed rules. "You encourage them to operate fairly and properly in the market, but you don't tell them how to do it," he said during his time as FSA chief executive.
I don't think the facts support the argument that RBS is an instance of Brown taking his eye off the ball.
 
So you could say this has not only caused massive inequality, it's massively distorted perceptions of how our economy is actually working. It's made making money so easy people stopped believing poverty was real, widespread, involuntary and growing. But that's just the compound difference between having a home that isolates you from inflation while adding huge piles of equity to your wealth and being trapped renting one that exposes you to inflations full effects. It's two completely different planets.
It's not a breeze for homeowners either, though. The cost gap to upgrade to the next level of property (better location, bigger property, more bedrooms) also widens, and the stamp duty take, being percentage based, takes a chunk out of every house move which further restricts options. It can mean, as it did with us, that we couldn't afford the move to a bigger/better property so what started as a 5-year plan in the house we bought when we married, turned into us still being there 30 years later. Fortunately it suits us well enough and neither of us has been obliged to move for work but others, with growing families, or new jobs, have found themselves stretched.
 
It's not a breeze for homeowners either, though. The cost gap to upgrade to the next level of property (better location, bigger property, more bedrooms) also widens, and the stamp duty take, being percentage based, takes a chunk out of every house move which further restricts options. It can mean, as it did with us, that we couldn't afford the move to a bigger/better property so what started as a 5-year plan in the house we bought when we married, turned into us still being there 30 years later. Fortunately it suits us well enough and neither of us has been obliged to move for work but others, with growing families, or new jobs, have found themselves stretched.
Agree with this. :D

We’ve relocated 3 times for work reasons.
 
Brown swallowed the consensus thinking of his time: he created the Financial Services Authority to keep an eye on the banks. The FSA, whose Chief Executive of the time was John Tiner, took its eye off the ball. A good article on quite how misguided the FSA were can be found in The Guardian. It says that all regulators everywhere missed the crash

And if you'd like to read more about John Tiner, try here.

I don't think the facts support the argument that RBS is an instance of Brown taking his eye off the ball.

Interestingly, half of the new labour knighted bankers destroyed their respective organisations. Ultimately, it was on Brown’s watch, as both chancellor and PM.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/jan/21/sir-fred-goodwin-gordon-brown
 
Ultimately, it was on Brown’s watch, as both chancellor and PM.
Yes, it was. But, unless you take
  • the role of the FSA
  • the fact that the financial crisis that ruined RBS was global
  • the ABN Amro takeover just before that global financial crisis
  • 15 years of Conservative-led deregulation that Brown inherited
out of the equation, you haven't explained how RBS is a 'wonderful example' of Brown taking his eye off the ball.
 
The idea of principles-based regulation isn't inherently bad - it works quite well with data protection, for example. But it does need to be backed up by something. In data protection, there is the Article 8 right to privacy and family life, and the Article 10 right to receive and impart information. So adhering to the principles keeps you on the right side of human rights legislation, too. In the case of financial regulation, unless the principles are underpinned by other legislation they risk becoming merely lofty ambitions, which will be subsumed within the drive for profit and the company's risk appetite (which includes its assessment of the risk of being caught out and the penalties being less than the profits).
 
The gap between rich and poor widened under Blair

no argument from me on that. Neoliberalism delivered with a smile. Sold his soul to Murdoch, who gladly obliged and regularly wanted his pound of flesh in return.

I personally despise everything the Tories stand for, and believe we should follow the 3rd way model of Scandinavian countries. Starmer does not represent any notion of this as of yet, unfortunately.
 
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