Keir Starmer

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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Yeah, the idea that Starmer will set labour right from Corbyn is sheer make believe, I have to say.

The decline of labour has preceded corbyn, preceded Starmer, preceded Blair and Miliband even.

I think a lot of UK anti-corbynites have run with this bugbear long past its sale date. People are allowed to make political mistakes. It's not productive to hold it against them 3 years later. By all means, any proletarian political culture should be unceasing war and zealotry within the moment, and as a Marxist I've criticised the labour lefts quiescent inability to fully understand the power that needs to be built up to fight the ruling class, but that was then, and this is now — Martin Fry, ABC.

That being said, people who support the labour party merely because they aren't tories as they cannot envisage the concept of lesser evil not applying to certain minorities should be shamed into converting to Islam so that they feel the full brunt of labours war on terror policies.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
thirdform said:
Yeah, the idea that Starmer will set labour right from Corbyn is sheer make believe, I have to say.

The decline of labour has preceded corbyn, preceded Starmer, preceded Blair and Miliband even.

I think a lot of UK anti-corbynites have run with this bugbear long past its sale date. People are allowed to make political mistakes. It's not productive to hold it against them 3 years later. By all means, any proletarian political culture should be unceasing war and zealotry within the moment, and as a Marxist I've criticised the labour lefts quiescent inability to fully understand the power that needs to be built up to fight the ruling class, but that was then, and this is now — Martin Fry, ABC.

That being said, people who support the labour party merely because they aren't tories as they cannot envisage the concept of lesser evil not applying to certain minorities should be shamed into converting to Islam so that they feel the full brunt of labours war on terror policies.
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Just to reference your second paragraph there, do you personally see it as having not been in a state of decline? I thought you'd always seen it as something corrupt or corrupting, being essentially idk bourgeois politics.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
DannyL said:
Just to reference your second paragraph there, do you personally see it as having not been in a state of decline? I thought you'd always seen it as something corrupt or corrupting, being essentially idk bourgeois politics.
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That's a good question actually. To answer it, I have always seen it as a bourgeois party, right from its outset, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't had working and lower middle class constituencies as social bases. When we talk about former labour heartlands we aren't merely talking about a numerical majority but a compact between unions and industry.

What has happened since Thatcher is however labour has become not so much a party of the middle class north london elite (as Priti Patel would impudently have it) but a party more so about a shared core of ideological values. The LP, is no longer .. (even within the terms of bourgeois capitalist politics) a guarantor of industrial relations between workers and management. It's wrong to say labour has become solely a middle class party out of touch with the working class (because clearly workers in certain areas such as London vote for them.) But its politics notwithstanding, it has no real clearly defined social base, other than what can perpetuate its upkeep. It is in this sense that I am speaking of a labour decline. A party that is formless in many senses and can be tossed hither and dither.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
I think that's fair. I remember reading somewhere someone described Labour under Corbyn as the party of state sector workers - they put it better than that, they meant teachers, social workers etc. Those who middle-class culturally but who've bee jibbed financially (everyone reading this board bar the odd outlier I'd guess). But there was some kind of link with a recognisable "class".

The decline of those relations isn't just about Labour though right? More broadly there's been a big decline in union membership in the UK and a loss of worker's power pretty much everywhere? Tbf I don't know what the picture is internationally.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
It's not a strawman and it's by no means restricted to holidays. The people who insist that those on low incomes are only poor because they stupidly spend their money on fripperies instead of basics are the same people who either ignore, or actively defend, MPs (Tory ones, at least) who are caught putting the most ludicrously gratuitous things on their expenses accounts, and attack anyone who thinks this isn't OK as bitter, envious lefty losers.

Naturally, if a Labour MP does the same thing then they're a hypocrite, a champagne socialist, etc. etc.
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It's a whole structure of feeling isn't it. There's not really any reason to expect random people to hold a set of views which are internally consistent. It's just not how consciousness works I think.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
DannyL said:
A movement that utterly failed to achieve anything beyond a historic loss of seats.
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I think at a minimum you can credit the corbyn experience with stopping the austerity programme in its tracks. I'm not sure they could even get away with starting it up again now and might not be able to do that for a long time. Lots of factors obviously but corbyn seems like one of the bigger ones to me
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
The relevant folk misconception of science is, taking it for mathematics, that it provides ultimate truths while, ironically failing to take it for mathematics, ignoring that one counterexample can sink the Titanic
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
shakahislop said:
I think at a minimum you can credit the corbyn experience with stopping the austerity programme in its tracks. I'm not sure they could even get away with starting it up again now and might not be able to do that for a long time. Lots of factors obviously but corbyn seems like one of the bigger ones to me
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Has austerity been "stopped in its tracks", though?

1651948738698.png

If you look at local authority spending, yes it's increased slightly since 2016, but that seems to be accounted for entirely by increases in council tax, and is in any case is still a lot less than it was in 2010 (when there were 5 million fewer people in the UK).
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm all for giving credit where it's due and it's good that Labour stopped (or helped to stop) some specific government motions. But I'd say we're a very long way from seeing the end of austerity.

And their huge majority since 2019 means they can do whatever they like, unless it provokes a substantial rebellion from their own back benches.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
mixed_biscuits said:
If the weatherman says it's raining while you're swanning about in your speedos, who do you believe?
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i think if i were to get into a conversation with a weatherman i'd try to change out of my speedos, or at least wrap a towel around me
Mr. Tea said:
Has austerity been "stopped in its tracks", though?

View attachment 11416

If you look at local authority spending, yes it's increased slightly since 2016, but that seems to be accounted for entirely by increases in council tax, and is in any case is still a lot less than it was in 2010 (when there were 5 million fewer people in the UK).
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the honest answer is that i don't know. there's certainly nothing in the news about it, and hasn't been really since Cameron Term II was cut short by Brexit, and neither the government nor the opposition are talking about it, so i guess its not happening (by which i mean the Cameron-Osbourne core project, really what their whole government was about both in practice and rhetorically, of reducing taxes and reducing public spending, didn't seem to continue after they left, and its very much not part of the conservative platform right now i think)
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
shakahislop said:
i think if i were to get into a conversation with a weatherman i'd try to change out of my speedos, or at least wrap a towel around me

the honest answer is that i don't know. there's certainly nothing in the news about it, and hasn't been really since Cameron Term II was cut short by Brexit, and neither the government nor the opposition are talking about it, so i guess its not happening (by which i mean the Cameron-Osbourne core project, really what their whole government was about both in practice and rhetorically, of reducing taxes and reducing public spending, didn't seem to continue after they left, and its very much not part of the conservative platform right now i think)
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Sure, but how much of that extra spending is A) not linked, directly or indirectly, either to Brexit or the pandemic, and B) how much of it has benefited ordinary people?
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
DannyL said:
I think that's fair. I remember reading somewhere someone described Labour under Corbyn as the party of state sector workers - they put it better than that, they meant teachers, social workers etc. Those who middle-class culturally but who've bee jibbed financially (everyone reading this board bar the odd outlier I'd guess). But there was some kind of link with a recognisable "class".

The decline of those relations isn't just about Labour though right? More broadly there's been a big decline in union membership in the UK and a loss of worker's power pretty much everywhere? Tbf I don't know what the picture is internationally.
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It's a decline in the west certainly, with third world mass industrialisation and outsourcing. Whether we will see the same tendancy in Bangladesh or South Korea for example is up for debate, but even then its much harder to camouflage politics in the age of mass communication and connectivity.
 
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wild greens

Well-known member
I think at this point the outsourced service provider model over here will be very difficult to escape from, the union concepts are probably finished

Most places are so deeply embedded into the hard & soft service provider model that it would be extremely unlikely to envisage things going back "in-house," but this model is certainly arranged as to avoid true governance or accountability

The likelihood of Starmer intervening on such subjects is unlikely regardless, in fact his Labour tried to introduce a marketing campaign which aims to continue the gut-out
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/l...require-public-contracts-uk-companies-1086306 (etc)

The expense involved is actually a larger fiscal burden on the resource in practice, though it does of course remove most liability from the central point. It can be quite lucrative for the niche technical contractors though
 
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version

version

Well-known member
Gove's apparently been looking at opening a new British coal mine, but I'll believe it when I see it, it's not a great step in terms of the environment and even if it goes ahead then it's still a tiny step toward rolling back outsourcing and I can't see it happening on any kind of large scale.
 
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