The General Politics Thread v2.0 (AKA the "Labour are Cunts" thread)

[johnnyboy]

29 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

 Westminster politics is much more visible. I think it would help if people knew what the fuck local councillors even do. 

Sometimes I feel sorry for our local councillors.  Two big issues we have locally are potholes and permitted developments where office blocks have been turned into rabbit hutch flats, which have then been rented out by other local authorities to ship people out of London.

This is all put on the shoulders of the town council by locals even though roads are the responsibility of the county council and permitted developments come from Westminster to intentionally cut out the local council from local planning decisions (for local people).

[BigJag]

57 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I would argue that the fact that some peoples' votes don't matter is a bigger issue.

Please expand on that.

I work for Leicester City Council. Our team manage and maintain the street lighting and festival lighting. From my experience councillor engagement is quite strong and they do bring forward the public's concerns. We are constantly held to account by local councillors on lighting matters. This is also true for other teams within the council. 

Edited May 20, 2023 by BigJag
Update

[Keith Houchen]

4 minutes ago, BigJag said:

Please expand on that.

O    n        T    h    a    t 

[Keith Houchen]

But seriously. 
 

I think what Chest means is best exemplified by the 2015 election. UKIP received about the same amount of votes as the SNP and Lib Dem combined. UKIP won one seat, the others won 64. Now obviously that’s skewed by the fact UKIP stood in more constituencies than the SNP but 12% of the voters views were represented by one MP. Regardless of your feelings on UKIP, it’s not a representative democracy. 
 

My constituency is one of the safest seats in the country so the thousands who vote for anyone but Labour, their votes won’t matter in that sense.  

[BigJag]

I would have thought the same about Leicester East. It's always been Labour. Yet we've had a change to Conservative. When anyone in their right mind can see that they're completely the wrong people to have in government. Whether there's a competent alternative is highly questionable. The Cons took a battering nationally. Yet this former Labour stronghold bucked that trend. Having an Asian PM is partly the reason. The poor voter turnout is another huge factor.

The number of people that I know who neglected to vote is absolutely astonishing. They just can't be bothered. How can that attitude be changed?

[Keith Houchen]

5 minutes ago, BigJag said:

The number of people that I know who neglected to vote is absolutely astonishing. They just can't be bothered. How can that attitude be changed?

That’s the million dollar question. Pollsters and parties talk about middle ground and swing votes, but by far the largest voting block is non voters! It’s a catch 22 because those who are the most politically apathetic, largely due to the two main parties having policies and stances that you can fit a rizla paper between, are the ones who feel the full brunt of poor policy. 
 

I’d say it’s mostly deliberate. The established politicos know that the more the disenfranchised and disillusioned people become engaged in politics, the more their days are numbered. It serves their interests to exclude. 

[JNLister]

On 5/5/2023 at 9:29 AM, JNLister said:

My council (South Gloucestershire) went from Conservative to No Overall Control after they lost 10 of their seats, which is a big surprise given most analysis was that it was 50-50 whether they'd lose the 3 seats needed to lose control.

And my ward went from three Conservative to two Conservative and one Labour. Not exactly a revolution, but I think it's the first time I've ever been somewhere where Tories have lost something.

Labour and the Lib Dems finally agreed a coalition here. We actually voted the Tories out of power. Probably means council tax going up and the public loos shutting, but it's still a good feeling.

[Guest]

There's nothing worse than a public loo that won't shut, so that's tax money well spent.

[Hannibal Scorch]

45 minutes ago, Uncle Zeb said:

There's nothing worse than a public loo that won't shut, so that's tax money well spent.

There is. One that doesn’t shut or have a loo seat. Though it’s not a problem for everyone I guess 

 

[BomberPat]

On 5/19/2023 at 10:10 PM, Chest Rockwell said:

Voting for labour in my area is not going to directly lead them to gaining a seat or any more actual power. So it's also not even universally true at the most basic level. 

I'm in the opposite position where I can freely admit that while I'm unlikely to vote Labour at the next election unless they really manage to pull together a manifesto that appeals to me, I'm doing so in the safest of Labour seats, so giving my vote to a smaller party is a risk that I can afford to take. It's daft that we have to take these things into consideration, but that's the system - I think it was @Keith Houchen who used the analogy on here of the political party as a bus; there might not be one getting you exactly where you want to go, so you get the one that gets you nearest. At this point in time, I have no confidence in the Labour bus to even be going in the right direction. 

It comes down to what a lot of people have been saying - the Labour Party aren't entitled to my vote just by virtue of not being the Tories. They can't spend their time disavowing the Left of the Party whenever they come anywhere near having a degree of influence, and then insist that the Left owe it to themselves to bite their tongue and rally behind a leadership that would rather they weren't there when it comes time for an election - they certainly never extended the same logic or the same courtesy to Corbyn, as the right and centre of the party did precious little biting of tongues and rallying behind the leadership then. And I hate that I've brought up Corbyn to make that point, because this isn't a Jeremy Corbyn thing, it's a Labour Party thing.
Tony Benn wrote back in the '80s about how if the Labour Party could be "persuaded" to denounce its Marxists, then they wouldn't be permitted to stop until they'd also got rid of its Socialists, until they became "a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public." - it's hard to deny that's where we're at.

I consider myself a Socialist. The Labour Party were already the party I would bite my tongue and vote for because they were the closest thing to my politics that were on the agenda, but still a long way off. But how far away from my politics should they be permitted to move before there's no rational reason why I should be expected to vote for them? What reason do I have to support a Labour Party that isn't supporting the labour movement during the most prolonged and widespread industrial action of my adult life? Or a Labour leader saying that Labour are the "real conservatives" and that he needs to go further in reforming Labour than Blair did in revoking Clause Four? Why should I support a Labour Party that has no public position on nationalising utilities, that actively refuses to challenge the Tory position on criminalising protest, or with an immigration policy so close to the Tories that you couldn't fit a cigarette paper between them? 

They offer me nothing. Why should I vote for them? Would they be better than the Tories - probably, in the short-term, but define "better" when the overall trajectory is the same. We don't need a notional improvement, we need transformative, meaningful change, and Starmer has actively refused to entertain any suggestion of that while actively scrubbing any sense of progressive or left-wing policy from Labour's platform. Fuck him. 

[Keith Houchen]

Nice. Imagine what kind of despicable stuff you’d have to have done to NOT get the whip back. 

[Jazzy G]

1 hour ago, Keith Houchen said:

Nice. Imagine what kind of despicable stuff you’d have to have done to NOT get the whip back. 

Socialism, apparently. 

[The King Of Swing]

Not a good look for Starmer. 

[Jazzy G]

2 hours ago, The King Of Swing said:

Not a good look for Starmer. 

Even worse for Corbyn. 

Presumably they're trying to bury this beneath all the furore about Johnson's diaries. 

[Butch2000]

GAPES was given the whip back recently so nothing should surprise. And Angela Tinge Smith. And GAPES.