The panic that people attach to Labour not being note perfect and not having a fully costed manifesto that’s revised weekly is bizarre.
Starmer will beat Truss in an election. When he is elected, we drag him left and force him to do things that we want.
If everyone on the left mobilises and unifies, Labour will be in power for a decade.
If Starmer comes out now and speaks about nationalising everything by borrowing more than the Tories propose to, Labour will be out of power for another 5-6 years. Yes we want it. He does too. But it would be suicide to try and please me right now.
25% of this country is lost. Racist UKIP forever Tories. Unwinnable votes. Another big double digit percentage will just vote for whoever their newspaper tells them to.
The kicker?… if people on the left start amplifying those newspapers, that percentage just gets bigger. Stop doing their goddamn job.
Starmer is imperfect but he will win the next election with a higher vote share than Corbyn (a man that I adored). The system is broken and rigged. Starmer has forensically torched a man with an 80 seat majority government handing out free money to people. We will NEVER get a Corbyn elected from opposition, we will only get one after half a decade of strong Labour government. Perhaps not even until FPTP is scrapped.
Muting this thread as I’m sick of screaming and pissing into the wind. Appreciate that nobody cares xxxx
Its exactly this that will get him elected, its first time I've heard Starmer talk like he knows what planet he's living on and which country he has to win over in an election... you know he just might have chance. Just start talking about Scotland now Keir and what Labour have to do North of the border and the wind will move behind you!
It’s really simple, he is going to fix it.
I'll respond to all these at once, even though UnrelatedPseudo is now ignoring the thread so won't see it.
I don't think I am being unreasonable. No political party launches a fully costed manifesto this far out from an election. Cameron didn't do it in 2008, for example. In fact, he supported increasing public spending until the financial crash when he felt he had the cover to blame Labour and campaign for austerity.
Connected to this, and speaking personally, I always assumed Stamer would move away from the 10 pledges and Corbynite policies and move Labour to the centre. I know there are those here who have heavily criticised him for doing so, and I respect that position. I just always assumed that the tack to the centre ground would happen and so the pledges Starmer got elected on are not the main issue for me. Again, many will disagree, and I respect that. Each of us will vote in the next election based on our own reasons and whether we feel a party deserves our support.
I help run a CLP, and I Have a Labour MP, so I regularly hear gossip and second-hand stories and all sorts of inside baseball information. I take it with a massive pinch of salt. But what is concerning me more and more and more is not the lack of announced policies or announced detail, but what is a massive lack of planning.
This autumn's conference will apparently approve policies, which is again fine, but economists like Richard Murphy and Danny Blanchflower have come out and said that they are unable of
any economists advising Labour at the moment. When they complain about a lack of work going in to realising a vision of a fairer Britain, then I worry. There are working groups set up by the NEC, but again silence from them as to their work and outputs. Corbyn and McDonnell set up the Economic Advisory Committee in 2015 (which I feel was underused but that's another story), but there has been no equivalent from Starmer. There are tonnes of centre-left academics and think tanks who would jump at the chance to advise a Labour PM, I am aware of very few being commissioned or publishing reports that influence thinking.
We have had 12 years and more of low cost borrowing opportunities sqaundered by the Tories as they pile on £1.5 TRILLION of public debt and push millions into poverty as the infrastructure of the country falls apart and people have experienced a decade of stagnant wages whilst millions of young people cannot buy a property, spending a fortune in rent making a minority of the population richer and richer.
As I was corrected earlier in the thread, the option to borrow and invest relatively cheaply like Corbyn did probably has gone.
The country needs huge investment, we have a huge Tory debt, and the economic system is broken. Perhaps there has no been a challenge to a prospective Labour Government like this since Attlee in 1945. He re-made the country in large part thanks to years of policy work started during World War Two.
Where is the equivalent? I don't think that is an unreasonable question, even if it may appear rhetorical.
