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Labour Leader: Keir Starmer VII

gavreid said:
Voting green (or for anyone else) won't make a blind bit of difference, it's just a similar dead end. When we all realise that much maybe strides can be made...
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Well, by voting green we can at least *TRY*. The alternatives are essentially: 'Give up and die whining "its not fair!"

Honesty may be the best policy.
 
My Dad spent some time in the Army (about a century ago!). One story he told was that the official instruction for when in barracks was..

In the event of fire, lay down until carred to a place of safety.

Erm, if everyone was laying down, who was going to do the carrying?

Sadly, reminds me of the way: "We give up, no point in voting for what we need!" seems so often the policy people assume they have to adopt.
 
There's a terrific article in London Review of Books by Will Davies (here) that mulls over some of these issues. It's ostensibly a review of The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save The Planet by Brett Christophers, but it reads as a diagnosis of the present moment. Davies writes:
the central fact of the climate crisis is that there is very little time, and the scale of the political challenge increases with each passing day. The importance of acting as swiftly as possible scrambles our usual political and moral coordinates, forcing us to look beyond the political and economic solutions we might usually hope for, and more favourably on those which are considered ‘realistic’. Waiting for solutions to emerge in a bottom-up fashion, whether from activists or from markets, is not sufficient...Only the state has the power, the money and the coordinating capacity to direct capital investment at sufficient scale and speed towards the renewables sector...The priority, as it has been now for decades, is to go as big and as soon as possible.
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Jim Audiomisc said:
Well, by voting green we can at least *TRY*. The alternatives are essentially: 'Give up and die whining "its not fair!"

Honesty may be the best policy.
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I’m probably fortunate in living in a fairly safe Labour seat. I can vote green at comparatively low risk. If you live in a Labour marginal, or a Tory seat that might go Labour with enough support, the decision to vote Green is fraught with more risk. Not an easy choice, under our present system.
 
laughingboy said:
There's a terrific article in London Review of Books by Will Davies (here) that mulls over some of these issues. It's ostensibly a review of The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save The Planet by Brett Christophers, but it reads as a diagnosis of the present moment. Davies writes:
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On a slight (vague tangent) there was a piece on radio 4 this morning, Sunday, about assigning a form of citizenship to whales, either in New Zealand or wider Polynesia.

Whales were assessed to have a value of $2m, just as human life is assigned a value for economic calculations.

If a ship is found to have hit and killed a whale the owners would be liable to a $2m fine, as a result they are incentivised to fit anti collision devices, a win for whales and ecology.
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
Alas, a bit more isn't enough. Reality doesn't care what people think, only about what they do. And the problem is that Labour is akin to the Tories - unwilling to face up to what it needed *urgently*. Whatever people may wish to believe, behaviour shows quite clearly that Labour follow the same dogmas as the Tories - but with a nice smile - and we are already reaching the point where changes will be too late or require much more *difficult* situations along the way. i.e. cost is all more in terms of the damage that will be done by the climate to our ability to live, eat, etc.

No matter how you try to look at it the reality has been clear for many years. To get the changes we need people have to vote for them. But waiting until someone else "goes first" means no-one goes anywhere... except to disaster for all those who can't take a rocket to Mars!
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Hard to determine whether "more" is "a bit more" though. Labour do get it but at the moment they have chosen to take a gradual rather than radical path on climate, probably because of what happened in 2019 and because voters aren't in the mood for moving too quickly on climate (despite the country's sympathy and support for matters green). And Labour's green policy is hardly Tory. I agree the sooner, the better though. It will save billions (and lives) but we are dealing with politics and people, 17-odd million of whom voted for anti-green Brexit. Therein lies the problem.
 
gavreid said:
Just smart enough to realise what they're up to. That's really an attack on being educated and wise to Labour's support for the rich...
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You don’t have to be smart to see what they’re up to, just read what they say. Streeting is being quite open and honest, he is telling everyone out loud that the NHS is going to be further privatised.

A vote for Labour is a vote for more privatisation of the NHS. Anyone who votes for Labour to save the NHS is deluded

Just in case anyone hasn’t noticed, privatisation of public services is the problem, not the cure.
 
ks.234 said:
You don’t have to be smart to see what they’re up to, just read what they say. Streeting is being quite open and honest, he is telling everyone out loud that the NHS is going to be further privatised.
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I agree but Labour is hoping that millions won't see it for what it is and they want to marginalise those that do as lefties, hippies etc etc - there's enough of them here after all !
 
gavreid said:
I agree but Labour is hoping that millions won't see it for what it is - there's enough of them here after all !
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This is the bit I don't get, Labour is telling everyone that they will literally hold the doors wide open to privatisation of the NHS.

I guess it’s another example of comfortable lie being more palatable than an uncomfortable truth
 
ks.234 said:
I guess it’s another example of comfortable lie being more palatable than an uncomfortable truth
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People are hoping beyond hope (completely irrationally) that Labour is going to be transformative after a decade and a half of misery. That is why the fall is going to be so painful in a couple of years time. It's the same explanation for the growth in the far right across Europe i.e the failures of the centre (left) parties to deliver on expectations.
 
gavreid said:
People are hoping beyond hope (completely irrationally) that Labour is going to be transformative after a decade and a half of misery. That is why the fall is going to be so painful in a couple of years time. It's the same explanation for the growth in the far right across Europe i.e the failures of the centre (left) parties to deliver on expectations.
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Yes I suspect "blame it on the Tories" will only get them so far.
 
gavreid said:
People are hoping beyond hope (completely irrationally) that Labour is going to be transformative after a decade and a half of misery. That is why the fall is going to be so painful in a couple of years time. It's the same explanation for the growth in the far right across Europe i.e the failures of the centre (left) parties to deliver on expectations.
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Surely Labour must also have done this analysis for itself. And if, as you suggest, a painful fall happens within the next parliament, that just opens the door to the far right to walk right in, as there's only one alternative to Labour, in many minds. Do they not see the risk that, if they fail to enact significant change and improvement quickly and decisively, they will just be enablers of Fascism in due course?
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
Surely Labour must also have done this analysis for itself. And if, as you suggest, a painful fall happens within the next parliament, that just opens the door to the far right to walk right in, as there's only one alternative to Labour, in many minds. Do they not see the risk that, if they fail to enact significant change and improvement quickly and decisively, they will just be enablers of Fascism in due course?
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I don't think they care, they hope to ride the train for as long as they can. Look what happened to Blair in the May 1999 local elections, neck and neck with the Tories only two years after the landslide, coupled with a historic loss of councillors. The bit you have to grasp is the Labour MPs are in it primarily for their own careers but the system is much more volatile than it was a generation ago - witness the rapid collapse of Johnson...

en.wikipedia.org

1999 United Kingdom local elections - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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