this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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I understand Labor isn't meaningfully better these days.
What's the chance it doesn't fail to do anything to help its constituents and then calls an election and loses in like 2 years?
I may not be Starmer's biggest fan but a Labour government would be a massive improvement over the cavalcade of reckless, incompetent chancers we've had running thr country for far too long.
Labour are meaningfully better than the Tories, they've just slipped a bit from where they should be.
They're still categorically a huge improvement though.
Yeah everyone says that but I've yet to see anyone actually provide any evidence. I don't know how they can be so confident when they haven't even announced their manifesto yet.
Anyway the Conservatives big problem is that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel talent wise, long before sunak came on the scene. Labour hasn't spent the last 5 or 6 years gutting themselves of talent.
Didn't they purge Corbyn and anyone left of Tony Blair though?
There is, unfortunately, a lot of space between Blair and where the Tories currently are
There is a phenomenon here in America where our "left" party will get elected because of how unambiguously evil the conservatives are, fail to help their constituents or even stop those conservative policies, and lose house elections until they're out of power. Gained power after 8 years of Bush in 2008, then lost seats in 2010,12,14, and the presidency in 2016. Then they regained the house in 2018 under Trump, and presidency in 2020, and lost the house majority and senate seats in 2022, and are on track to lose the presidency and senate in 2024.
Am I being needlessly pessimistic by expecting Labor to follow the same pattern?
One thing that changes the dynamic substantially is that we don't have the same balance of power between the two houses of the legislature. Whatever the failings of our system, and there are many, the issue where the executive can't do anything without capitulating to a house of the legislature controlled by the opposition doesn't happen outside of unusual circumstances. As such we can probably expect Labour to at least generally follow through on opposing any Conservative policies that they currently oppose.
That does leave the issue of policies that they do agree with the Conservatives on. I'm certainly not expecting the UK to become some kind of utopia under Labour. We can probably at least expect things like the relentless demonisation of trans people and asylum seekers to reduce significantly, both of which are the subjects of recently-passed Conservative legislation. Whether or not they can improve the lives of the average person outside of those groups remains to be seen; the Tories have not left them with a good economic situation to work with, and I haven't seen any solid plans for anything that seems like it operates on a sufficiently large scale to make a big difference. I hope that they'll do some measure of re-integration with the EEA, which would help a great deal, but I'm filing that under "plausible hope" rather than "likely". We almost certainly won't see Labour withdraw us from the ECHR, which the Tories look more and more likely to do with each passing day.
So... yes and no. There are reasons to be pessimistic. There are also reasons to look forward to it. It's too reductionist to see it as a binary situation.
I appreciate that youre asking about what you've heard but I think you've been mislead.
I mean, its not like labour are brilliant or what they used to be but anyone who's claiming they're the same or not better is either deliberately lying or willfully ignorant. I think people built up labour too much in their heads and are still bitter about their reality check. "Behind every militant atheist is someone who beleived too hard."
You would have to go out of your way to do as badly and be as corrupt as the tories. The claim they're the same is a thought terminating cliché that doesn't hold up to any scrutiny which is why people who claim it, never want to drill down into the detail.
You'd think the apparent leftists who claim that and the right wing tories who also claim it would get their information and attack lines from different sources.
However, apparently not.