All Tories Are Cunts thread

[Vamp]

20 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

Cool. As long as you realise that this helps the Tories.

Like I said, its all about priorities. 

 

Except if you vote for current day Labour you're essentially endorsing a Diet Tory party anyway. 

 

[Keith Houchen]

7 minutes ago, Vamp said:

Except if you vote for current day Labour you're essentially endorsing a Diet Tory party anyway. 

 

And then of course if Labour win the next election and I think they’re awful, the only way to get rid of them is to vote Tory and if I don’t vote Tory I’m a Labour enabler. 

[Hannibal Scorch]

Keith Houchen is actually Owen Jones. Pass it on.

[Devon Malcolm]

Do I still vote for Labour even if my local candidate is "rat-faced" Rebecca Long-Bailey plz advise.

Edited July 28, 2022 by Devon Malcolm

[Lorne Malvo]

57 minutes ago, gmoney said:

If Jeremy Corbyn loses an election it's because he's unelectable, if Starmer loses it'll be Charlotte Flair's fault

 

[Dead Mike]

23 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Do I still vote for Labour even if my local candidate is "rat-faced" Rebecca Long-Bailey plz advise.

Of course you do.....duh

[BomberPat]

"vote Labour to keep out the Tories" only makes sense if we have any confidence that the Labour Party are offering anything meaningfully distinct from the Tory Party. 

When Tory leadership candidates are openly talking about outlawing strike action, yet that same week Labour are sacking their own MPs for supporting said strike action, or when the Tories are presiding over record high utility bills and a cost of living crisis, yet the Labour Party won't even entertain the prospect of nationalising utilities or services, or offering any alternative economic system to the one currently fucking us over, it becomes a matter of nuance rather than any ideological distinction. Repeat ad nauseum for immigration policy, transphobia, and everything else rotten in Westminster.

I see very little that's worth supporting in the current Labour Party, and there likely never will be again if their only electoral strategy is continually relying on the assumption of having my vote no matter what. 

[Keith Houchen]

8 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

yet the Labour Party won't even entertain the prospect of nationalising utilities or services

Despite the current leader saying he would do exactly that when courting the memberships vote. I don’t trust Starmer, if he lied to his own members about his pledges, he will lie to everyone. 

[BomberPat]

2 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Despite the current leader saying he would do exactly that when courting the memberships vote. I don’t trust Starmer, if he lied to his own members about his pledges, he will lie to everyone. 

Exactly. It's not just that he's useless, it's that he sold himself as the man for the job on a set of policies, pledges and principles, and has fucked us over on every one of them, and I'm not naive enough to believe he's playing a long game of pivoting to the right to win support with the intention to then suddenly bring in a load of left-leaning policies once in power, because that never happens - the pivot to the right always just keeps on pivoting. So not only is he inept, not only does he steadfastly refuse to come up with any actual policy platform, he's already proven that there's no reason for me to trust him, believe in him, or invest in him in any way. Not exactly inspiring stuff.

I'm due a phone call with my Dad tonight, and I already know a good 50% of it will be him moaning about Starmer, because it always is. My Dad was a lifelong Labour voter, was on the doorsteps for Blair in '97, and then became utterly dejected with the party under Blair around Iraq and various other things. He was won over by Corbyn, who he saw as a proper Labour politician, and actually attended a couple of rallies. He thought Starmer was the right choice for leader, because he was presentable, spoke well, and, most importantly, said all the right things about Labour policy - he seemed like a presentable, media-friendly face for an extension of Corbyn's policies, which is what the party actually needed. Instead, the moment he got the leadership position, he abandoned everything that got him there. My Dad sees him now as worse than Blair, because Blair at least seemed to believe in something beyond playing politics for it's own sake.

On top of all that, I work in higher education, which is being absolutely gutted as a sector at the moment, and we've had a solid year of industrial action, strikes, job losses, programmes being cut, more and more marketisation of the whole sector, more than a decade of either no pay increases or pay increases below the rate of inflation, and with lots more to come. It's awful. Today UCU Tweeted that they've not any engagement from Starmer the entire time he's been Labour leader. I'm not someone who thinks the sun shone out of their respective arses, but Corbyn and McDonnell were on our picket line last year, Starmer hasn't said a fucking word about it. And it's pretty obvious why - he'd rather try and play the media game and not risk having the Daily Mail make it look like Labour is the party of grumpy, entitled, anti-British whiny metropolitan academics than he would actually make an effort to fight for working people, for meaningful social mobility, or for future generations. 

[Carbomb]

I am one of those for whom Labour will have to earn my vote. Being told to vote "to keep the Tories out" is a bit of a slap in the face of those of us who were dismissed as "far left" and "entryists" and "Trots" for supporting policies that Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson had when they were PMs, when the centrist dads of the party couldn't support "our" candidate, after years of us having to hold our noses while voting for Blair. It's been all one way, and I'm done with it. (Not that it matters in my constituency, which is pretty much a Labour stronghold.)

That said, and I find it distasteful to defend Starmer, but perhaps this is simply strategy? Maybe he realises that, as a Labour leader in a right-wing country, the best thing he can do is keep his mouth shut and let the Tories hang themselves, and only reveal more left-wing policies once they're out, because he knows that, the moment he gives away anything substantive about their manifesto, the press will just switch back and go after him full-on like they did Corbyn and Milliband?

EDIT: In this regard, I'm not quite up to speed: if it turned out, say, that he was planning to re-nationalise industries, is there anything legal or regulatory that prevents him from keeping it quiet to the public until the very last minute, i.e. GE or after they get into power? Not that I actually think he will - I guess I'm just being more hopeful than anything.

Edited July 28, 2022 by Carbomb

[Hannibal Scorch]

4 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

 

EDIT: In this regard, I'm not quite up to speed: if it turned out, say, that he was planning to re-nationalise industries, is there anything legal or regulatory that prevents him from keeping it quiet to the public until the very last minute, i.e. GE or after they get into power?

Not as I understand. And I think that's a reason Starmer is in a very tough position. Without backing from the right wing papers, he isn't going to win. If he announces policies they don't like, they attack. If he relents on pledges he made they don't like, he may get less grief. SO how do you posit yourself to win? It's clear the polices we want to see on the left are against the wants of the right, so do you piss off the left, or try to get into power and then do the things you want once in? Like the Tories do.

[Carbomb]

4 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

Not as I understand. And I think that's a reason Starmer is in a very tough position. Without backing from the right wing papers, he isn't going to win. If he announces policies they don't like, they attack. If he relents on pledges he made they don't like, he may get less grief. SO how do you posit yourself to win? It's clear the polices we want to see on the left are against the wants of the right, so do you piss off the left, or try to get into power and then do the things you want once in? Like the Tories do.

See, that's what I hope for. I just doubt it would happen, even if that was his plan, because the Gaitskellites/centrists in the party have demonstrated they're prepared to fuck the left over, even at the cost of allowing the Tories back in.

[Dead Mike]

22 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

 

EDIT: In this regard, I'm not quite up to speed: if it turned out, say, that he was planning to re-nationalise industries, is there anything legal or regulatory that prevents him from keeping it quiet to the public until the very last minute, i.e. GE or after they get into power? Not that I actually think he will - I guess I'm just being more hopeful than anything.

Whst was actually said was that they'd still nationalise the railways should they win the next election as this is relatively cheap/easy given large parts are already state owned. For utilities its a harder ask as Labour's proposed fiscal rules (which limit levels of public spending....based on challenging perceptions of Labours financial record) & current (post Covid) levels of debt don't afford this immediately. Control and customer protection would be managed by increasing regulation on providers. 

[JNLister]

3 hours ago, Carbomb said:

 

EDIT: In this regard, I'm not quite up to speed: if it turned out, say, that he was planning to re-nationalise industries, is there anything legal or regulatory that prevents him from keeping it quiet to the public until the very last minute, i.e. GE or after they get into power? Not that I actually think he will - I guess I'm just being more hopeful than anything.

The only thing close to that is the Parliament Act. The Lords can block a bill passed by the Commons until the next session of Parliament (which is usually a year), but the convention is they don't do that if it's something that was in the election manifesto.

[Carbomb]

4 minutes ago, JNLister said:

The only thing close to that is the Parliament Act. The Lords can block a bill passed by the Commons until the next session of Parliament (which is usually a year), but the convention is they don't do that if it's something that was in the election manifesto.

Yeh, that was the only thing I had in mind that could be an advantage to Labour announcing it, but, given what we've seen of the Tories and the way they've breached every possible convention in recent years, it's become quite clear that would not be the security it was previously.