How much will it cost to re-nationalise the water, gas, electric and rail industries? How often to Tories win elections? What are the odds of the Tories not lining the pockets of those who bankroll them by selling off any nationalised industry?
I don't get why pretending this isn't the case because it makes people feel better if we do has to be a thing. At most it would be a short term thing and with that reality it's surely legitimate to question whether the party should commit to it as a policy.
What's bizarre that just because is in a party's manifesto it's wrong to ask some pretty obvious questions about the wisdom of it. But I guess that's where we are now. Criticism of a policy is probably an unforgivable smear now.
This is a fair and valid question. Naturally renationalising certain industries will take a lot of work, and the benefits and drawbacks should be considered when doing so. Like all parties in government, Labour will have to make tough decisions and will in all likelihood have to abandon certain plans and ideals to pursue other ones they believe are more pertinent.
But saying "the Tories will undo it" isn't valid because it presumes the political capital will be there for the Tories to undo it
if they regain power, and that they won't moderate their
own manifesto to be more in-line with a Britain that increasingly supports nationalised industries if Labour's next government is successful. A century or so ago the idea of a Tory government supporting a welfare state would've been ridiculous. Indeed before the liberal reforms at the start of the last century, seeing poverty as a defect of the individual was the norm as opposed to a telltale sign that someone's a cnut.
Labour, under Corbyn, are seeking to shift the centre by reintroducing left-wing economic ideas as being something fairly normal again as opposed to somehow radical and on the fringe.
If they were to succeed (and I have my doubts as to whether they will) then there's every chance that in response the Tories will have to moderate their own economic message, as they did post-WWII when they supported public services, something they wouldn't have done before.
If you feel that this isn't worth doing or that it's a silly gesture, then you're probably not left-wing. And I don't mean that to be offensive or derogatory - I just mean it in the sense that you're clearly fairly alright with the current economic setup we have, barring a few minor policy shifts here and there, and that you're not particularly in favour of a restructuring of the economy. That's fine - you have every right to that view. But it's a matter of fact that for a lot of people the current economic approach isn't working, wasn't working before Brexit, and won't work without a radical rethink as to how politics are done, and what our economic approach is as we deal with oncoming problems like climate change, the housing crisis, automation etc. For those people voting for a centrist Labour isn't really enough, and if you're message is that we shouldn't implement certain policies because the Tories
might undo them
if it's in their manifesto when they regain power, whenever that may be, then we're as well giving up now. Certainly, Thatcher didn't exactly care about what a lot of her dissenters and opponents thought during the 80s, and never cared that a Labour government would seek to undo a lot of her changes if they regained power. And she's probably the most influential PM the country has seen since Attlee.
Stirrer.