droodzilla
pfm Member
Delighted to hear Labour will reverse the two child benefit cap. That's terrific news.
General Election 2024
- Thread starter gavreid
- Start date
Delighted to hear Labour will reverse the two child benefit cap. That's terrific news.
droodzilla
pfm Member
Grown-up politics klaxon!
gavreid
Pretty Words...
When? Terrific if it happens...
Tony L
Administrator
<moderating>
I’ve locked the lengthy Sunak and Starmer threads. It makes sense IMO to just run the one General Election 2024 thread until after the election. It will be more focused and keep relevant information in one place. We can open other threads on the winners and losers after that point as applicable. It will hopefully make for tighter focus a clearer reading experience, plus avoid a lot of cross-posting.
I’ve locked the lengthy Sunak and Starmer threads. It makes sense IMO to just run the one General Election 2024 thread until after the election. It will be more focused and keep relevant information in one place. We can open other threads on the winners and losers after that point as applicable. It will hopefully make for tighter focus a clearer reading experience, plus avoid a lot of cross-posting.
droodzilla
pfm Member
Apparently not. Michael Rosen has had the same shit thrown at him, and confirmed a few months ago that, according to his lawyers, it counts as a "legitimate expression of opinion".
I think that for a statement to be actionable, it has to be a claim about something the individual concerned did (or said) - a verifiable matter of fact - that is both false and defamatory.
I hope Corbyn sues him. It was always a zionist lie to get rid of him (as they do with any politician not in their pocket). The tragedy we see in Gaza now directly flows from years of zionist bribery and blackmail. The effect of these actions to replace politicians with any morals on domestic USA/UK politics is huge but zionists don't care about that.
ks.234
Half way to Infinity
That to Starmer supporters Corbyn is something far more frightening than far right Tories like Elphicke is the big reveal
ff1d1l
pfm Member
I'd get the popcorn in for that. And contribute to a crowdfunder if one was set up for that purpose.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
I wish he'd resigned at the Gaza demo in the Autumn and shown some leadership but...
This is because - as we reported earlier - he has said he willstand against the official Labour candidate in his Islington Northconstituency.
A Labour source said "we are focused onreturning as many Labour MPs as possible", and that Corbyn - who was running to be prime minister at the last general election - is no longer a partymember.
Corbyn expelled from Labour
The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hasbeen told he has been expelled from the party he led four years ago.This is because - as we reported earlier - he has said he willstand against the official Labour candidate in his Islington Northconstituency.
A Labour source said "we are focused onreturning as many Labour MPs as possible", and that Corbyn - who was running to be prime minister at the last general election - is no longer a partymember.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
What did Starmer say?
Keir Starmer has just given back-to-back interviews on the BBC's Today and Breakfast programmes. Here's a re-cap of what he said:- Labour will only make commitments "we know we can fulfil"
- When being asked about scrapping university tuition fees - which he backed when running to be Labour leader - he said he can't, because cutting NHS waiting lists is the priority
- He said Labour wanta to remove the two-child benefit cap "in an ideal world" but we "don't have the resources at the moment"
- He still wants to abolish the House of Lords "but the question is if it is the priority"
- He will carry out TV debates, but won't commit to the Conservatives' idea for weekly head-to-heads
- And he said that Palestine should be a state - but would not say when a Labour government would recognise it
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
Keith chasing that Tory vote relentlessly, running a party I simply do not recognise as Labour
Seanm
pfm Member
This nails it.
If you see the Conservative Party and the Labour Party as they (sometimes) see themselves and as they (usually) want us to see them, that is as political antagonists locked in a life or death struggle over the soul of the nation, then yes, it makes sense to say, "Labour are not as cruel as the Tories, so they are by far the better option."
Look at them in terms of how they function, as two rivalrous branches of the same organisation, and it's clear that makes no sense at all. Why would Labour be cruel? That's not their job! Their job is to step in every other decade and say, "Sadly there is nothing we can do to address this cruelty", and lock it in forever.
Are things going to get better for the disabled, for immigrants, for trans people, under a Labour government? History says no, they are going to remain more or less the same, at best. And for the duration of this election they are going to get very bad indeed.
Tony L
Administrator
Add to this the mainstream media seemingly giving near equal billing to elite public school fascist Richard Tice and his oligarch-backed racist party despite zero MPs and only two councillors and the UK’s decline is locked-in. The window of dialogue has been set. Starmer accepts the rules. He will play the game.
The UK is over. It is a dead nation killed by Brexit and 14 years of thieving oligarch rule. We are done as no party is even allowed to address the elephant in the room. As I see it increasing decline and fascism of one colour or another is pretty much the only possible destination from where we are right now. The exit roads have all been blocked off. The failure seems all but locked-in.
wulbert
pfm Member
14 years of Tory rule. Give them another chance? (As suggested on a recent, now deceased, thread)
If Labour do win, how could we persuade them to reverse austerity? People's lives depend on it.
(The New Yorker April'24) "What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?"
In 2008, Brown’s Labour government commissioned Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities. Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work. In 2010, he presented his ideas to the incoming Conservative-led coalition, which accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this is great. . . . I was pretty bullish about the whole thing,” Marmot told me. “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”
Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. “For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,” he wrote. “This is shocking.” According to Marmot, the U.K.’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable European nations. “The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,” Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, “It was a political choice.”
In the spring of 2009, Cameron told a gathering of Party members in Gloucestershire, “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.”
Between 2010 and 2020, central-government funding for local authorities fell by forty per cent. At one point, it looked as if sixteen of Newcastle’s eighteen libraries would close. The city’s parks budget was cut by ninety-one per cent. The situation forced some creative reforms: Newcastle City Library now hosts the Citizens Advice bureau, where residents can apply for benefits and seek other forms of financial guidance. (The library is featured in “I, Daniel Blake,” Ken Loach’s anti-austerity film of 2016.) But other parts of the city government fell apart. “Youth services and a lot of community-support services, they just disappeared completely,” Durcan said. Child poverty rose sharply. (About forty per cent of children in Newcastle currently live below the poverty line.)
If Labour do win, how could we persuade them to reverse austerity? People's lives depend on it.
(The New Yorker April'24) "What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?"
In 2008, Brown’s Labour government commissioned Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities. Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work. In 2010, he presented his ideas to the incoming Conservative-led coalition, which accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this is great. . . . I was pretty bullish about the whole thing,” Marmot told me. “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”
Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. “For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,” he wrote. “This is shocking.” According to Marmot, the U.K.’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable European nations. “The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,” Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, “It was a political choice.”
In the spring of 2009, Cameron told a gathering of Party members in Gloucestershire, “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.”
Between 2010 and 2020, central-government funding for local authorities fell by forty per cent. At one point, it looked as if sixteen of Newcastle’s eighteen libraries would close. The city’s parks budget was cut by ninety-one per cent. The situation forced some creative reforms: Newcastle City Library now hosts the Citizens Advice bureau, where residents can apply for benefits and seek other forms of financial guidance. (The library is featured in “I, Daniel Blake,” Ken Loach’s anti-austerity film of 2016.) But other parts of the city government fell apart. “Youth services and a lot of community-support services, they just disappeared completely,” Durcan said. Child poverty rose sharply. (About forty per cent of children in Newcastle currently live below the poverty line.)
paulfromcamden
Baffled
"THINGS ARE GONNA GET TO-BE-ABOUT-THE-SAME-AS-THEY-ARE-NOOOOOW..." 
Pravda
pfm Member
Can't argue with that, apart from when the decline started. I'd say 1979, the year of the witch and toads.
wulbert
pfm Member
This direction of travel was already on the cards in 2014, which was my reason for supporting independence for Scotland. It's entirely possible that an iScotland could have been captured by the same malign, self-serving types, but at least there would have been some hope. I have slightly more faith in Scottish voters to generally support redistributive, progressive policies. Guess we'll never know now.
I hope N.E. England demands more of Labour than the Tories ever offered.
Income inequality measured by the Gini coefficient peaked in the UK in 2001, but that doesn't contradict your point.. the long term rise began in 1983. It takes about four/five years for government policy changes to have an impact on a measure like this. The turnaround after 2001 was started in 1997; the rise in 1983 was started in 1979..
Here's the UK with its neighbours, plus the USA, higher values are worse:
Income inequality: Gini coefficient
The Gini coefficient measures inequality on a scale from 0 to 1. Higher values indicate higher inequality. Depending on the country and year, the data relates to income measured after taxes and benefits, or to consumption, per capita.
ourworldindata.org