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Labour Leader: Keir Starmer VII

If the LDs hadn't propped up Cameron's first government we would be in a very different place. And there probably wouldn't have been a second Cameron government and a Brexit referendum. The LDs are a rather different party now, but under Clegg they were entirely despicable apologists for ruthless austerity (and I think Clegg's later career as Zuckerberg's patsy makes it very clear what sort of person he is). They bear an enormous responsibility for our current shitshow.
Are they? Why do you say that?

The personnel are different but I don't see any sign of a reversion to the Charles Kennedy era of being relatively progressive.

Swinson was more fiscally hawkish than peak Cameron/Osborne.

The current liberal leadership is virtually invisible, as far as I can tell, so it's hard to know what they stand for, these days.
 
Are they? Why do you say that?

The personnel are different but I don't see any sign of a reversion to the Charles Kennedy era of being relatively progressive.

Swinson was more fiscally hawkish than peak Cameron/Osborne.

The current liberal leadership is virtually invisible, as far as I can tell, so it's hard to know what they stand for, these days.
What the LibDems stand for is what they stood for in 2010, and that is whatever it takes to get into the trough in a coalition with the tories.

Swinson was terrible. As well as the party itself from 2010-2015, there is a major responsibility for brexit right there. It makes me laugh Swinson seemed to really believe she could win a majority at a GE. Staggeringly bad party and leader. As for now, who is the leader of the LibDems? Without an internet search, does anybody know? I certainly don’t.

Anyway, it’s gone a bit OT. When does the group go back to slagging Labour and Starmer? ;)
 
I wouldn't bet on it. Labour are in coalition with the tories in Scotland.
Is that so?

Anyway, standing up against narrow-minded nationalism is a good thing and should be promoted wherever nationalism rears its ugly head.
 
What the LibDems stand for is what they stood for in 2010, and that is whatever it takes to get into the trough in a coalition with the tories.

Swinson was terrible. As well as the party itself from 2010-2015, there is a major responsibility for brexit right there. It makes me laugh Swinson seemed to really believe she could win a majority at a GE. Staggeringly bad party and leader. As for now, who is the leader of the LibDems? Without an internet search, does anybody know? I certainly don’t.

Anyway, it’s gone a bit OT. When does the group go back to slagging Labour and Starmer? ;)
Wonder if I might ask- while telling everyone here they should vote Labour, you admitted you don’t actually vote for them, that you have voted tactically. In an English constituency where the seat is Conservative, which party can a Labour supporter possibly vote ‘tactically’ for to unseat a Tory MP?
 
Ed Davey. He has a second job as an executive director type thing which coins it in - he justifies it by saying he uses the extra money to help with the costs of his disabled child - trough feeder imho.
No? And I was so sure it was Lloyd George.
 
Ed Davey. He has a second job as an executive director type thing which coins it in - he justifies it by saying he uses the extra money to help with the costs of his disabled child - trough feeder imho.
Despite having a disabled son, Davey has “almost always” voted against raising welfare benefits and “generally” voted for reductions to welfare.
 
Scary watching all the Labour types desperately deflecting from the moral cowardice and all round uselessness of Starmer, a man who is in a position to implement real political reform and actually end centuries of elite Tory rule, onto a largely irrelevant minor party that never were. I say ‘scary’, I mean ‘pathetic’.

Sadly this is just how UK politics works and why nothing ever changes. The UK will be exactly the same hopelessly undemocratic right-wing monarchy in five years time after a truly massive Labor majority as it is right now. Just a red tie wearing Tory party led by an empty grey business suit.
 
The LDs were part of the government that invented Osbornomics and helped finally bury the post-war social democratic settlement, and without them that government would not have existed. That's very far from being irrelevant.

I think they've learned that particular lesson, and I would happily vote for them to help unseat a Tory, but I fully understand some people's cynicism about them.
 
The LDs were part of the government that invented Osbornomics and helped finally bury the post-war social democratic settlement, and without them that government would not have existed. That's very far from being irrelevant.

It would be interesting to rerun history, but I suspect if it had fallen and gone to election Cameron would eventually have scraped a majority and then gone in far harder. Everyone was sick of Labour’s US Republican warmongering, the expenses trough-feeding, and no one liked Gordon Brown anyway. I know it seems crazy now, but at the time Cameron did look to have rebranded the Tories into something less racist, less corrupt and even green. Sure, it was clearly a public relations front, but they beat Labour on both seats and vote share, and I suspect that would have increased had it gone to a second election.

Reality is a tough pill to swallow, but the simple fact is Labour couldn’t even win against a string of leaders as hopeless as Theresa May or Boris Johnson, and that’s after a decade of Osborne’s failed economics and crippling austerity. It has taken a shift to real Trump-grade fascism/white nationalism, and levels of corruption the UK has never seen before to make Labour look competitive again. Even now Labour can only “win” by default. They have no discernible policies, conviction or moral integrity. They are pitching an empty void and calling it ‘opposition’.
 
Scary watching all the Labour types desperately deflecting from the moral cowardice and all round uselessness of Starmer, a man who is in a position to implement real political reform and actually end centuries of elite Tory rule, onto a largely irrelevant minor party that never were. I say ‘scary’, I mean ‘pathetic’.

Sadly this is just how UK politics works and why nothing ever changes. The UK will be exactly the same hopelessly undemocratic right-wing monarchy in five years time after a truly massive Labor majority as it is right now. Just a red tie wearing Tory party led by an empty grey business suit.
The point is that the decline into right wing authoritarianism is not down to just one man or one party. It has been a long, slow slide that started a long time ago

There has been a drift to the right supported by mainstream politics and opinion over the last five decades and the only attempt to arrest that decline in that time was met with hostility and manufactured propaganda. The scary/pathetic thing is how many people who now deplore right wing authoritarianism, also choose to buy into that manufactured outrage and deplore the only chance we have had for an alternative to that right wing authoritarianism for half a century.
 
The point is that the decline into right wing authoritarianism is not down to just one man or one party. It has been a long, slow slide that started a long time ago

I’d say the big shift was Blair. That was the point the UK ceased to have a left-wing opposition as the Labour Party was now clearly to the right of the LDs, SNP, PC, Greens etc. Authoritarian, corrupt and war-mongering.
 
I’d say the big shift was Blair. That was the point the UK ceased to have a left-wing opposition as the Labour Party was now clearly to the right of the LDs, SNP, PC, Greens etc. Authoritarian, corrupt and war-mongering.
Personally, I’d put it at Callaghan. It was he who abandoned what was called Keynesianism in favour of monetarism and he who took us into taking loans from the IMF which although paid off quickly, left us with a promise to privatise.

Callaghan was a Thatcher enabler
 


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