I'm thinking that noticing the many similarities between Labour and the Tories misses the most important thing, the fringes.
I'm thinking that noticing the many similarities between Labour and the Tories misses the most important thing, the fringes.
To elaborate...
The UK has always favoured centrist governments, when the Conservatives get too nasty they're unpopular, Labour only wins when they do Thatcherism-Light, etc.
We now have a choice between a relatively moderate conservative prime minister, who is admittedly being dragged to the right by his party and others, and a relatively moderate labour leader who has purged the extremism from his party to pursue a centre left agenda.
In both cases, what I see are two people who believe in principles, compromise them for politics sake, who are fundamentally in favour of the status quo rather than revolution and prefer to win through being seen as competent.
Fine, this has been the case most of my life. It's why I've been relaxed about politics. Whatever happens, things will largely stay the same with small incremental changes.
The difference now is about the fringes. Not a day goes by recently without a headline grabbing policy coming out of the government press machine making a virtue out of being a bunch of ****s.
The ridiculous culture war stuff, the politicisation of fear and anger. Pointless, ineffective policies that are intended to win a few votes regardless of the harm they cause. Sickening stuff a lot of the time, born out of selfishness of behalf of those in power to try and keep that power and get as much as they can for themselves. It feels like they be the ones looting the Titanic as it sank.
So whilst Labour are not likely to usher in a revolution, a golden age or fix things overnight. I'll take centrist middle aged dad running the country if it means an end to this nonsense. An end to a government attacking it's own citizens in the name of defending the people.
Yeah, it's strange how much that overtones window has shifted during my life time. It makes me hanker for the quiet times if John Major's stint... And I say that as a socialist.
I think that the business of parliament got hijacked by the business of the city during the 90s. Thus has left us with career politicians.
The difference being what sort of business benefits the city. The Tories have been great for boom and bust. An absolute bonanza for hedging and shorting, but less so for long term stability. I think that's where labour come in. The sane business but with a calmer plan.
In context, "overtones" is a pretty decent autocorrect for Overton here.
When you're traveling in the wrong direction you need to move the steering wheel and correct course.
If labour comes in and just tweak things it won't really make a lot of difference. The direction of travel in the country is the wrong way and maintaining the course that the Tories set isn't a solution. Labour need to steer in the other direction and work to undo a lot of the things the Tories have done.
- Reverse the slow creep of NHS privatisation.
- Reverse the immigration shit show.
- Reverse the enablement of corruption.
- Reverse the loss of public trust in regulators, and stop letting them be funded by industry.
- ...and the one that they really don't want to get a grip of, reverse the damage to our relationship with the EU.
After 14 years of Tory messing with stuff, there should be a stack of action items on day 1 to halt the damage. A bonfire of legislation. The fact that they don't have a plan like this worries me immensely.
I'd love to see those things.
I'm going to maintain hope. Reason being that no one except me will be helped or harmed by whether I choose worry or hope.
I would argue that I'd rather straighten the car then continue turning in the direction we're currently going.
The centrism is a side effect of First Past the Post surprisingly. Look at countries with proportional representation. Compare the far right seats in European countries to seats here held by the Brexit / Reform party. If I recall correctly, the 2015 election results are one of the worst, with the Brexit party getting close to 13% of the vote and only 1 seat.
FPtP tends to force parties to compromise before election to gather support. Successful PR governments require the compromising after the results to form a consensus.
The results from this paperare quite interesting at comparing voters to how MPs vote. Essentially the average CON voter is actually more socially conservative than how CON MPs vote. Similarly the average LAB voter is also more socially conservative than how LAB MPs vote. Essentially if you make the populace pick, they’ll prioritise social conservative policies first even if they wanted more financially left policies.
If you think Mr Sunak has any principles whatsoever beyond accumulating more wealth, you are seriously overestimating his moral standing and giving him far too much credit for acting in good faith. I can’t say I like Mr Starmer very much, but I think the idea that both sides are comparable in this sense is misleading.
This is a very good point. Many people voted for David Cameron back in 2010 and 2015 because he presented himself as a nice, normal, middle-class dad - essentially Tony Blair Mk.2 - but the mad fringes of the Conservatives dragged him into Brexit, then took over the government. This simply couldn't have happened under Labour. Even if Blair Mk.1 had been as weak as Cameron and allowed himself to be pushed around, we wouldn't have had anything of the enormity of Brexit or the Rwanda scheme.