And just seen this useful breakdown on just how badly and how quickly Starmer and Labour lost popularity.
I’d forgotten the impact of Freebiegate, but it did cut the legs off any claims to moral authority.
As an outside observer, it was interesting to observe Labour partisans making the argument — “no, see, Starmer is just pretending to be an empty suit with no grand political vision, he’s playing the long game of being non-threateningly bland and technocratic, once he gets into office he’ll finally reveal the revolutionary spirit he’s been concealing!”
And, from the outside, it was even possible to set aside my skepticism a bit, and wonder whether this argument was in fact correct.
But now — even from the outside, at a distance — the truth is glaringly obvious.
Shame.
I think one cast iron rule of recent British politics is: if you think the guy you want to win is obviously lying but that it’s basically ok because the ones he’s lying to are those other guys and certainly not you, then you are shortly due for a nasty surprise.
So a more mild civilized UK version of the ~5K posts in this thread here: 
In a way, I don’t blame Labour for lying about no tax rises in order to get elected. We are in the Jean-Claude Junckers dilemma, where no honest party can get elected. The voters won’t elect a party that says taxes must go up, or a party that says spending must be cut, but at least one of those things is true.
Nevertheless, Labour did lie, and are now caught with their pants down. Part of me thinks they should just go for it and raise income taxes substantially for all earners, and take the political hit. You want a generous welfare state? Fine, then you have to pay for it. The alternative, a damaging, economically distortive hodge-podge of taxes on the “rich” and the “broadest shoulders” won’t cut it, because those shoulders are already bearing a disportionate amount of the weight. Higher earners are already doing things like cutting their hours to avoid the dreaded £100K 60% marginal rate. This is very bad for the economy. No, you, average voter, will have to pay more. Median earners are actually taxed relatively less, by historical and G7 standards.
In every country it amazes me that a skilled leftist pol can’t stand up and say:
We all agree our level & quality of services are too low. But guess what: that’s all that we can buy with the taxes we collect. The other side are lying scoundrels if they tell you they can magically conjure up tax cuts and better services. We all know in our own lives that there are no free lunches. There’s no free lunch here either. Vote for me/us to get real. Vote for the other guys to keep getting lied to and screwed.
This is a thread about UK politics, but you keep bringing it back to US politics
Assuming you were speaking to me …
I don’t intend to. Why could Starmer not have stood up and said what I suggested when he was standing for election? If anything I’d suggest that UK voters are more, not less, rooted in reality than voters in most other countries on any continent. As such, that bracing dose of reality ought have been a winning play for him.
And yet he chose to weasel and fudge. With the predictable result that the voters are now pissed when reality exposes the weasel to have been an outright lie. And about what are the voters pissed? About the fact they’d been lied to. If your voters get pissed about being lied to, the lesson for pols is “quit telling the giant ‘you’re gonna get caught out over this’ lies.”
Or at least it should be, and I’m not out in crazyland (I don’t think) to suggest alternatives.
No, that’s not true at all which many of us were screaming as this was happening in real time. Some proportion of people would defect if the Labour party was completely honest but this portion would be smaller than the historic margin that Labour won by which meant there was a historic opportunity for Labour to sacrifice a tiny bit of popularity in exchange for principles and vision which also would have been smart politics because those principles and vision would have avoided the historic collapse of popularity, most of which stems directly from a lack of principles and vision.
The reason this is happening is not because it was some grand 4D chess strategy that us mere mortals couldn’t see the calculus of, which many people were trying to gaslight us at the time was the case, it was because Starmer was a generationally bad politician who was incapable of having opinions on anything because any opinion meant someone being turned off by that opinion. That people in the party could not see this as the predictable consequence of putting a man like that into power is an indictment of centrist brainrot that has consumed an entire Western political-media hegemony.
Like, this is what I wrote before the GE had happened
It’s not like I am especially skilled in my prognosticating skills, this was just plainly obvious to see, even for a political amateur like myself. If Reform wins the next GE, then everything I outlined basically came true and this serves as a warning that all of this could have been predicted before his tenure even started.
And this is what I wrote in 2022 in reaction to the exact Centrist brainrot thinking that’s lead us to here.
…they voted for Brexit.
They were lied to- by… guess who….drumroll please… a RIGHT WING POPULIST. That is what they do. They lie to get the “hoi polloi “ to vote for them.
I’m not trying to start a feud, but I genuinely would like to hear back from @FurloeRoth. If their perception is that I’m pooping in the UK-centric pool here I’d like to know that in plain speaking so I can stop.
Gosh knows this board has plenty of US-centric posters and threads. I greatly appreciate the window into other country’s politics. Being of English heritage myself the UK’s situation is especially interesting to me.
…I consider Starmer and the current Labour Party are “right-wing populists.” Austerity. Anti-trans. Anti-immigration. They purged the left-wing before the last election and are doing everything they said they wouldn’t do.
So the issue here with statements like this:
The assumption here is that Starmer is a “leftist pol.” But he isn’t. I don’t even consider him a centrist. And he’s lying because in the current climate, that’s what people with no moral fibre tend to do.
I readily grant your point that the Overton window of Labour vs. Tories has shifted a long way to the right and modern Labour is near to the, e.g. 1970s Tories.
But I honestly don’t know how the parties’ current left / right positioning compares to the current electorate’s.
My labeling was meant to say the more leftward party of the two of any era might speak practical truth and be heard, not shunned, for it. I wasn’t trying to say that the current relatively more leftward party is big-L Left in any positive absolute sense.
It used to be odd to hear (30-40 years ago, New York guy) that almost every country in Europe was left of the US Democrats. Even their “righties” were somewhere between the GOP and the Democrats (Tories about the same as GOP: Thatcher & Reagan).
I was in Ireland when David Cameron said Brexit was bad and pledged (promised?) that he’d resign if it passed. It did, and he did to his credit. May, Johnson, and that UKIP fucker Farage were all about £300 million going to Europe and stopping the influx of refugees.
Starmer has never impressed me as a smart guy. He was 80% knighted for being a great prosecutor, yet in the couple of PM questions I’ve seen and he was dismal, and certainly his visit to Trump, firstly belittled for his accent, and then his best accomplishment was reading KCIII’s invite as Trump either needs glasses or cannot read. He was cordial even when Trump cut him off, amidst an answer to the press.
I reckon he’s not bad enough to get a ‘lose confidence’ which will only serve to put more UKIP fuckers in. So Lead!
…it’s part of the global repositioning of the traditional “left-leaning” parties to the right. It happened to Labour, it happened to the Democrats, it’s happening where I live.
The “traditional left” are now represented by the outliers, in the UK it would by Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and Zack Polanski, in the US people like Mamdani, where I live by people like Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson. If you listen to what they say there isn’t any “doublespeak.” They don’t fall back to talking points. They can talk off the cuff.
Starmer is all talking points. It’s why he (and others like him) all talk like AI bots. So what you see is what you get. Globally the left has to rebuild knowing that everyone, including the media and the traditional “leftist” parties are out to get them.
The actual “skilled leftist pol” can and do say the sorts of things you want them to say.
I’m not sure how resigning was “to his credit”. He held an unnecessary (and non-binding!) vote on lighting a stick of dynamite, then walked away when the dynamite was lit. It was one of the most cowardly things I’ve seen a politician do, and that’s saying a lot.
He literally walked away whistling a little ditty to himself.