UK Politics Thread

I got into a discussion with a hardcore left wing labour supporter on Twitter and he wouldn't have that Corbyn's loss was vindication for the idea that the result was rejection for hard left politics. He cited the increase in popularity in the membership of the Labour party as vindication for his politics. You would hope that a loss would provoke a rethink.

Having looked at the Labour manifesto for the past few elections I am not entirely sure what's so hard-left about them. The issue with Labour's image seems to be more of Corbyn's image.

I'm totally onboard with the notion that Corbyn simply was never going to win an election, I am just not sure how Starmer just... vaguely hovering about is going to help the UK.

But that's the thing, that's not very hard left: That's returning to a more left-wing status quo that the UK has gradually moved away from (and arguably reversing a trend where the UK has been slowly creeping towards the far right culminating with the tories just full on enforcing a UKIP agenda). It's a bit hair splitty, I know, but it's not even nearly as left as Clement Atlee's government (not that anyone could go there. You can't NHS the NHS).

I disagree with the sentiment itself: Keynesian economics calls for increased spending in times of crisis to smooth out the economy (and then tightening spending when things go well). Arguably something like Brexit, which basically is a crisis, requires a decisive government that is willing upfront to make firm investments in order to ensure that the country weathers the storm. Ultimately, spending more now saves you from...

... well, this.

The thing is that it is an effective propaganda line, but if you look at the UK's debt it seemed to have ballooned under tory rule. Labour's plans were ambitious, but they were also fully costed - they had fully planned out how they were going to pay for it all and included this in their manifesto. The Tories have introduced a decade of austerity which hasn't affected the deficit at all, and have literally never tried to justify how they were going to pay for their own expensive plans. The notion that more debt is more bad is a simplistic one (since governments don't function under the same rules as the rest of us do), but if you subscribe to that notion, then you're still in a situation where the tories are doing a far worse job.

Yes, and that's the big frustration I think: You can come up with the most elaborate and clever plan, but shouting that your opponents are riding a Maoist bicycle is easier

It always strikes me as funny though that it serves politicians to talk about the opposition in terms of absolutes, so as you say, labour become communists. The reality between the two parties is a different fraction of the same idea. Like if you take tax; tax as a principle is to redistribute wealth to serve the many, at least it is in a modern democracy, and so is philosophically a left wing idea, and the reality of the application of tax between Labour and Conservative policy is as I said, a different fraction of the same idea. But it's always more sexy to paint the picture of Marxism.

You got further than I could stomach. I really, really want to kick that guy in the bollocks

Even the most cursory glance at his Twitter profile reveals him to be an affected twat. He genuinely refers to his feed/timeline as 'the old TL'. Fuck me.

The last clip is a perfect Alan/Michael at the petrol station moment

I don’t think the old Etonian I know thinks like that thankfully.

Absolute fucking state of it.

They are not getting within a sniff of power for at least the next decade, I suspect.

Yup. It's genuinely tragic. And how does she square the fact that the lack of pluralism in our political system has already allowed the 'far right' into parliament?

Germany will shortly be another coalition government, where the centre has held. The SNP have entered into a coalition with the Scottish Greens even though they would have been able to govern fairly comfortably as a minority government. Labour's unwillingness to work with the other liberal and left of centre parties is genuinely depressing. It very much feels that the Tories literally cannot lose for the foreseeable future.