A Dark Period in British Life

PR would have brought the BNP to the house in the 90’s. Now I know they are there now masquerading as tories, heck one of them is even Home Secretary!

 

Braverman had a 25k majority in Fareham however the boundary has moved and she will now be standing for the bizarrely titled ward of Fareham and Waterlooville. If you’ve got 2 mins to look or know the local area you’ll see the 2 towns are 10 miles apart!

 

Making the most of a rare opportunity to agree with Jimmy Viz on a political matter.

I think PR would be a good thing for British politics in the long-term and would do much to bring an element of 'grown up politics' back, rather than the increasing levels of tribalism we've seen since the Tories came to power.

My personal desire to see it introduced is from having to endure a General Election (2010) where I was unable to vote for any of the main parties due to living in John Bercow's constituency. By convention, none of the main parties stand against the incumbent speaker. Consequently, this was the choice that I was presented with for that election:
Bercow, John Speaker
Stevens, John Independent
Farage, Nigel UK Independence Party
Phillips, Patrick Independent
Martin, Debbie Independent
Mozar, Lynne British National Party
Dale, Colin Official Monster Raving Loony Party
Howard, Geoff Independent
Hews, David Christian Party, Proclaiming Christ's Lordship
Watts, Anthony Independent
Strutt, Simon Cut The Deficit

I've spent most of my voting life living in safe constituencies for one party or another. It's bad enough having a vote that is effectively worthless, unless you live in a marginal seat, but to literally have no option to vote for the party you are a member of at a General Election is ridiculous.

 

Only one party can be trusted.

https://www.loonyparty.com/

Some cracking policies and their party conference starts today...

 

Quality lol.

• We will replace employees of the Boarder Force with GP receptionists. This will dramatically reduce the number of people getting in.

 

Generally speaking coalitions work best when parties involved have long term strategic interests in common and overlapping policy platforms. Where they don’t work at all is in systems like FPTP where if they fail to create a ‘winner’ you end up with Parties that have little in common grubbing together for power and power alone.

I have been an advocate for PR pretty much since I stated voting. We came very close to it in 1997. Working for new Labour the discussions with Ashdown were basically PR as quid pro quo for not contesting some seats. Unfortunately for them and is as a country FPTP rewarded Labour with a massive majority on a minority vote so Blair took the decision to row back on that commitment.

 

intresting use of language in your last sentence jimmy! I’m not having a pop by the way I largely agree with you but for consistency just thought I’d pipe up

 

Let’s roll back to the last election. How do you think a PR enforced coalition between Johnson and Corbyn would have worked out? The Cabinet meetings would have been fun. The only thing the two had in common were they were both lying about their public stance on Brexit!

 

It is indeed a dark period in British Life. A time when liars call other people liars by picking up on tiny truths to cover their lies. Social media is full of opinions of people with an agenda and they choose what they write to support that agenda. You have a Corbinite agenda so you select the truths that damage the party unless it produces a Corbin manifesto. Let’s not forget that Corbin put Johnson in power and destroyed the red wall.
We live in a capitalist system and early socialist thought that they could change that, in Russia they tried and created the most repressive system that the world has ever seen. Governments work within the constrictions imposed upon them by economics and for that reason Starmer looks a lot like Cameron. We have no real choice because the game board has been set up to support the establishment and there is no change unless the voting system changes and delivers real change. Dark days indeed!

 

Politicians are all things to all men and women, until the have have their feet firmly under the table. Top and bottom of it for me.

 

Unless we're in the middle of a world war, the only two parties guaranteed not to go into coalition together are the Tories and Labour. Coalition, as far as the UK is concerned, is either of these two parties drumming up coalition support to get a working majority over the other.

 

The only alternative to change is not to change and that will forever deliver government that answers to nobody for the period in office. Just like we’ve got now.

 

Every Tory policy -

undermining net zero
attacking refugees
cutting inheritance tax
underfunding services
cancelling infrastructure
nimby housing policies
attacking climate protesters
demonising trade unions
restricting your rights to protest

- is trying to sell you the idea that elbowing others will elevate you. How has that worked for you in the last 40 years?
It seems to me that while we elbow each other it is only they who get richer. For the first time in my lifetime every parent
I know in the UK expects their kids to have a worse standard of living and their grandkids worse still.

Isn't it time for a bit of a rethink?

And for better or worse under the current system there is only one alternative to the above (the least bad) and you have to bite the bullet on this.

 

The stance Starmer forced on Corbyn on Brexit lost the red wall though quite likely if it hadn’t they would have lost metropolitan seats. Labour are stuck between being a traditional party representing working people and one that represents a more cosmopolitan metropolitan voter.

Some interesting points amongst the less interesting stuff though.

 

Damning with faint praise? Or is it a back handed compliment? Not quite sure, but thanks for reading it.

 

So Corbyn’s disastrous 2019 GE results were Starmer’s fault too? You can blame Starmer for an awful lot of things, but that is really pushing it. By the time the 2019 GE came around the damage was done. Corbyn’s lack of engagement/conviction during the Brexit campaign helped take us out of Europe, maybe being one of the deciding factors, given also the poor turnout in the younger age bracket and Corbyn’s popularity amongst the younger age group. Or are you saying that Corbyn should have come clean regarding his views on the EU in order to retain the Red Wall seats, at the risk of, as you say, losing the metropolitan seats?

It was pretty obvious that Brexit would be, and has proved to be, a complete disaster for most of the north (Richmond is doing okay), and it was a large section of Labour voters that swung it for Leave, as is demonstrated by them voting Tory in 2019 to ‘Get Brexit Done’. Practically zilch was done to get it through to these people the mistake they were making and the person who should have been at the forefront of making that point to them was the leader of the party they had always voted for. But he didn’t. Probably because he didn’t agree with the argument, being a lifelong advocate for leaving the EU.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66942985

 

it was a comment on the dichotomy that is at the heart of Labour’s problems rather than a comment on individuals. Labour have 2 competing bases. An inclusive diverse mainly London based (but some other big cities) balanced against a reactionary parochial working class base with very different priorities. It was an remains a very difficult balancing act to placate both elements.

Labour clearly made the political calculation that they had to shore up the metro base and as leader Corbyn must take responsibility for that decision as must Starmer who drove it. Would Labour have fared better if they had leaned more towards their tradition base and followed Corbyn’s natural inclinations I don’t think so.

I think there was no pathway for Labour to win a Brexit election.

As for Corbyn. I actually went to a couple of the pro European rallies he spoke at and he was very convincing in reaching people like me who aren’t exactly fans of the EU but knew the alternative was worse. I would probably have voted leave without his input. 7/10 was probably a bit higher than my mark but hey it was more than half.

Corbyn didn’t front the Yes campaign for Labour that responsibility was Alan Johnson’s. He did however speak at more rallies than anyone else so not sure where the idea that he did little comes from. I think he showed the way a leader of a party should behave. Put his personal views to one side to represent Labour members.

Election analysis shows that around 71% of Labour voters voted remain. I genuinely think anyone would have struggled to get more on board.

Starmer’s sudden conversion to being a hard brexiteer is just another example of a shape shifter who cannot be trusted and I’m surprised there is not more kickback on this.

 

He’s hardly a hard Brexiteer, as his recent comments in the US prove, but he’s scared of getting a kicking up here like Corbyn did, so his statements are all over the place, trying to please/avoid upsetting everybody.

Unfortunately, it all comes down to losing Scotland. Labour need to win traditional Tory seats to win a GE and they are only going to be won by someone from the right side of the party. So a move to the right (although the brakes should probably have been applied at some point) was necessary to get elected. A manifesto too left leaning will never win an election, as it just appeals to the people who are going to vote for you anyway, or at least who are not going to vote for the other side anyway. This is demonstrated by Corbyn winning a lot more votes, but few extra seats the first time around.

Starmer knows he will have been shedding some votes off the other end with some of the things he’s done, but he’s clearly calculated that shaving some votes from seats that he’ll probably win anyway is worth it for the bigger gains he’ll make, as without the gains he’ll be yet another leader in opposition. He has to keep saying the right things to win these seats, no matter how much it annoys the people on the left. Having the best manifesto in out lifetime meant nothing in the end, because it was never going to get Corbyn elected. Nobody from the left of the party has won an election since the 70s and the make up of the country is completely different these days. We have no industrial heartland and very few major trade unions, which have traditionally made up the Labour base. And with the right wing stranglehold on the media and social media enabling false narrative to spread like wildfire, and clever far righters knowing which buttons to press to appeal to the worse characteristics of a certain section of the population, it makes it very, very difficult for any decent, fair minded politician to succeed. The genie, as they say, is out of the bottle on that one.

The proof of the pudding will be what Labour actually do when they gain power. The Tories have done very little of what they promised and have marched towards fascism at an alarming rate. Starmer is doing what he needs to do to get elected, but once he has got the keys he then has the power to start changing things and move direction. Not too far too soon, as Labour need to stay in power, but to gradually start repairing the damage. The alternative is a Sunak/Braverman government that will destroy what’s left of the NHS, take us out of the ECHR and God knows what else. It is vital that the Tories don’t win again, so we don’t really have an alternative but to put Starmer in No.10. Voting for or trying to engineer a hung Parliament and expecting a better outcome will lead to the Tories getting back in again unless everybody buys into it and that isn’t going to happen.

 

I would suggest that there has not been more kickback because that is an incorrect interpretation of his stance. I think he is not in any way a hard brexiteer, but that he has recognised that the brexit argument is a closed book as things stand, and that any nod to the contrary would allow the Tory mischief-making media to kick into full gear.