The UK: The Keir Starmer years (1 Viewer)

funky said:
I fucking hate the word leftist

First of all, it's not even a word.
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I'm going to stick up for the word leftist here. It's been in use since the 1890s. I think we're going to have to accept it is a word - even if it's an annoying one.
 
Oh really? Fair enough then. My hatred comes from seeing right wing media using it as a negative connotation.

Like the way they’ve tried to poison the word liberal, without any irony of what the word actually means
 
funky said:
Oh really? Fair enough then. My hatred comes from seeing right wing media using it as a negative connotation.

Like the way they’ve tried to poison the word liberal, without any irony of what the word actually means
Click to expand...
To be fair, no one knows what liberal means any more
 
So Parliament is sitting today to decide the future of British Steel.

I'm all for nationalisation, but is there enough money right now to justify it?
 
They don’t have much choice. The company currently running it is threatening to shut the plant down, which would likely render it permanently inoperable, which would be a disaster for the industry and an enormous embarrassment for Labour.
 
It’s an opportunity for nationalisation that is broadly popular with everyone. Why wouldn’t a Labour government do that?
 
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Is it college politics? If Kamala Harris won the election, would Labour be nationalising today? Labour have been forced into this position due to external events. If there was a genuine choice then Reeves and her fiscal rules would be resisting it as strongly as possible.
 
What do you think happens when the supposedly 'left-wing' party are so right wing? Where does the left-wing vote go? The answer is that it dissipates, to SNP/Green in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales and....well, to where in England? This is where the Liberal Democrats could begin to score - provide an actual alternative, an actually progressive approach. They could really reinvent themselves here, hit some by-elections and start to get things moving. We've got at least 3 years before a GE, there;s time. But the left-wing vote has to cohere aropund someone, otherwise, we're heading straight for Con/Reform and the even worse version of what we have now, the full on Trumpian version.

We are right on the edge.
 
Labour are just astonishingly shit at reading the room. the public has very little appetite for these culture wars. you were elected to be a serious government.

so be one! stop engaging and taking provocative stances that don't represent the feelings of the people who voted for you! are none of the many highly paid aides and advisors smart enough to see this? do they really still think they need to pander to the right?
 
Obviously, what they should be doing is immediately rewriting the Equality Act so that it provides the protections for trans women that everyone who isn’t an extremist nutter already thought it did. Instead they’re saying ‘whelp, the law is the law, nothing we can do about that’. You’re the fucking government. Fixing bad laws is pretty much your entire job.
 
I've said this before but Labour has vastly underestimated the extent to which people lent them their vote because we had to see the back of the Tories. They wrote off going from 47/48% in the polls at the announcement of the 2024 GE to getting less than 34% on the night to Reform but it was also because of a lessening appetite for them as they spouted right-wing rhetoric to try and claim Tory votes. This decline in popularity has continued for a reason - they are just Tory-lite. No-one wants Tory-lite and they are absolutely paving the way for a massive swing to the right in 2028/29.
 
The only thing that barely makes sense is a Labour strategy that involves playing bad cop for the first two years to get shit in order and then play good cop in the 2 years before general elections.

How that fits into local elections I don’t know. And it also doesn’t explain the culture war mentality as mentioned above.

You can’t grind down the economy and play family values at the same time. Then you’re the party for no-one. And it’s a dangerous game to play in a world of parties like Reform who feed off growing frustration and tell people what they want to hear in order to gain favour.

Their PR is absolutely dreadful. They seem to want to be the party of inconvenient truths, but that only works if your message lands, which it isn’t, and you still have trust, which they don’t, and people understand what your end goal is, which nobody does.
 
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Hate everything about this and him.
 
Bear in mind that JD Vance has already mooted that protections for LGBTQAI+ people are a wedge issue for a trade deal. What is he setting us up for? Is this to send a message to that fucking soggy Wotsit Trump in the hope that he'll let us off easy?
 
One of the big problems seems to be that they’ve somehow created this big “get out clause” where ‘women’ is now ‘only’ a legal term to protect cis females, so we still are able to respect and be nice to trans people, as though it’s just a small thing designed to correct some terminology. They don’t seem to think it will have any major impact on how the wider public view this ruling, and how it’s a slap in the face to trans identity, and acts like a calling card for anti-trans sentiment.

If these anti-trans ‘feminists’ were so determined to do this with only cis female protection in mind and wish no harm on anyone it undermines, why are so many of them being so fucking smug about it?

This isn’t the simplifying rule that the government think it is (and it’s not just this government either). It doesn’t make the issue go away.
 
I also think that there is a further underlying issue of education on trans rights because there is still an incredible amount of impulsive whataboutery when it comes to toilets and sports. Most people really don’t have the stomach for supporting the wider and more important aspect of simply PROTECTING trans people because they’re treating 2% of the issue as 90% of the issue. The only way change gets brought about is through widespread allyship, and there isn’t enough understanding of what really matters with the wider public.
 
I ended up talking to my straight, rangers loon PT about this yesterday and even he was more reasonable than Starmer is being. He did some of the talking points you'd expect, like bringing up the Isla Bryson case, but ended up still being reasonable and thinking that trans people are being thrown under the bus.
 
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