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

[Keith Houchen]

Apologies @Dead Mike I was answering something you never even said!  Just noticed you quoted me about Starmer and I went off on a different point. Is it too late to blame education standards?

[Loki]

3 hours ago, Dead Mike said:

Nobody said that. I know lots of you really liked Corbyn but he was hated by the people he was meant to represent.  Now because of that we're living with the consequences of a Government who can push through whatever legislation they want. It's shit.

I think a lot of voters went down a real slide with Corbyn, I know I did.  When he popped up in the Labour leadership contest it seemed like a bit of a laugh and a breath of fresh air, and in the build to the 2017 snap election there was a genuine sense of Momentum (ho ho).  But the more he spoke the less people liked him.  Polls showed that the manifesto of 2017 and 2019 were pretty  popular with potential supporters, but he increasingly wasn’t and by 2019 he was cancerous on the doorstep.

My personal turning point was the Salisbury poisoning; his reaction to an attack on British soil was so weak and misguided that it started me wondering what his actual foreign policy thoughts were, and indeed he had a LOT of shit in his past that suggested he’d make a terrible PM.  His utterly non committal stance on Brexit was another; there seemed to be a real gap between what he publicly supported as Labour leader, and what he obviously privately thought.

I know people who voted Tory for the first time because of him; no worse legacy than that really.

His version of Labour having been roundly rejected at the ballot box, he should probably just be left to disappear into retirement and his allotment but here we are talking about him again 🤷

[Keith Houchen]

5 minutes ago, Loki said:

I know people who voted Tory for the first time because of him; no worse legacy than that really.

Says more about them than it does him, to be honest. 

[Carbomb]

Whatever the perspective on Corbyn, I'm getting really fucking sick of the insistence that the New Labour model is "more electable". It's really quite dishonest to go on about how Blair won elections when it's his iteration of Labour that got voted out, and was blamed for bankrupting the country; that, too, was also rejected at the ballot box. And Corbyn still had to contend with people looking at him like he was a continuation of the Labour party that supposedly caused the global economic crash, sold off the gold reserves, took the working class vote for granted by almost exclusively courting the middle-class vote, refused to undo the damage of the Thatcher and Major governments by not building new social housing and rolling back the union restrictions, and lost the country billions on PFI schemes.

Put it this way: it's OK to not like Corbyn - I don't agree with it, but I accept there are arguments to justify that position. What I am fucking done with is supposed Labour centrists behaving like they're bastions of realpolitik and better than the left of the party; the Blairites are just as responsible for Labour being out of government as they claim Corbyn is, and it's their iteration that was in power last. 

[Loki]

31 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Says more about them than it does him, to be honest. 

It says something about them, certainly, but it also says a lot about him and why he lost the election so badly.  

 If only Ed Milliband had been able to eat a bacon sandwich properly.   We could have been spared all this.

4 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

it's his iteration of Labour that got voted out, and was blamed for bankrupting the country;

Well, it was Brown who lost the election and his Labour was different from Blair’s.   Could Blair have won a 4th GE?  Quite possibly he’d have squeaked it, he was still personally popular.

Edited March 27, 2023 by Loki

[Carbomb]

7 minutes ago, Loki said:

Well, it was Brown who lost the election and his Labour was different from Blair’s.   Could Blair have won a 4th GE?  Quite possibly he’d have squeaked it, he was still personally popular.

Come on, hardly much different - economically and socially, he didn't change the paradigm. He still took the working class vote for granted and pandered to the middle class. And Blair stood down because he knew he was losing popularity. The war in Iraq cost him a ton. And he certainly wouldn't have held on following the Credit Crunch.

Sadly, Miliband's run was just too early in Labour's opposition stretch. Should've waited, let his brother take the flak.

[Keith Houchen]

17 minutes ago, Loki said:

47 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

 

It says something about them, certainly, but it also says a lot about him and why he lost the election so badly

Yeah, it says he doesn’t appeal to people who would vote Tory!  You make a good point about the differences in what he stood for and trying to placate everyone instead of being more forthright with his own views on hot issues. It’s pretty certain he was a leaver but wouldn’t say so because it would have cost votes. 
 

Thankfully Starmers policy on Brexit won over the electorate in 2019. 

[Loki]

1 minute ago, Keith Houchen said:

Yeah, it says he doesn’t appeal to people who would vote Tory!

Exactly.  And that’s a lot of voters.  If you want to win a GE you need to appeal to more than die-hards.  You need natural Lib Dems and Greens voting tactically, you need floating Tory voters who dislike the status quo, you need Remainers and Leavers alike, you need a broad coalition of different opinions and sentiments who are all winning to give you a chance.

Corbyn couldn’t do that.  He was someone who’d spent his entire career as a successful contrarian and couldn’t make the transition to coalition builder.   If the GE was just made up of UKFF posters he’d have romped home.  But it isn’t.

 

[Keith Houchen]

6 minutes ago, Loki said:

 If you want to win a GE you need to appeal to more than die-hards

Or to the largest group, those who don’t vote. 

[Devon Malcolm]

Jeremy Corbyn successfully proved that this country will never change, or certainly not for a very long time. In a way, he was an experiment in whether people wanted this place to be better - and they don't. As soon as he lost in 2019 I told my (now) 16yo to get out of this country as quickly as they could once they'd finished in education because people here don't give a shit about people like them.

[Nick James]

I am a voter, just to make that clear and this is purely from my own perspective, but I could also see an arguement for people not wanting to vote. You only have to look on social media, the media itself or anywhere discussing politics to see that for every 5 people slating the Tories, there are another 5 slating both labour and the Tories, but non-of those 10 are providing valid alternatives. So if I'm someone not as clued up on politics and election time rolls round, which way do I go? 

The Tories are terrible, with the evidence to show, but I read countless arguements against Labour as well, that's those two out of the running for my vote. I don't say a lot, if any discussions around who the alternatives to those two are so who do I vote for? 

I was 100% behind Corbyn, fell out with family over it and was genuinely gutted when he failed, but since that time, I haven't seen many (if any) alternatives pop up that are trying to grab my vote.

[deathrey]

Two brown people in charge in the UK. Some peoples heads will be exploding. 

[Dead Mike]

26 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Or to the largest group, those who don’t vote. 

This is a massive factor. It's also easier to mobilise people to vote against something, rather than for. This is largely what happened in 2019. Johnson wasn't widely popular at any point (I don't think he ever had positive approval ratings) but people definitely didn't want Labour so voted to prevent that.

[Lion_of_the_Midlands]

14 minutes ago, deathrey said:

Two brown people in charge in the UK. Some peoples heads will be exploding. 

*Gammon Mode* Coming over here taking OUR jobs. *Gammon Mode*

[Keith Houchen]

3 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

This is a massive factor. It's also easier to mobilise people to vote against something, rather than for. This is largely what happened in 2019. Johnson wasn't widely popular at any point (I don't think he ever had positive approval ratings) but people definitely didn't want Labour so voted to prevent that.

Anecdotal of course, but I do know of people who hadn’t voted before and won’t vote again because Johnson isn’t in charge. I know we’ve discussed how Johnson cultists aren’t swing voters, but the people I know loved the caricature but knew nothing of policy, but they also wanted to stop the terrorist sympathising traitor. 
 

Also, I know we aren’t politically alike, but you campaign and put your boots on the ground for your party, and that has to be respected. You’re one of the good ones.