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I’m a leftist who didn’t vote Labour; why am I happy with the election results?
I’m a leftist who didn’t vote Labour; why am I happy with the election results?– politicalbetting.com
As the title says, and many here will have gathered from my posts, I am left wing and not in the Labour Party. So you may expect me to be annoyed that Labour have got a massive majority to do with what they wish. And, to some extent, I am. But, when it comes to the actual results of the election and staying up on election night, I was and still am pretty happy – and so were a lot of other people who are on the left and not fans of Starmer’s Labour. But why?
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Apologies, Lucky. I did indeed misunderstand.
Or number 5.
And I'm Number 4.
(PS Why '148grss'? It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue)
Presumably the leader of the Famous Five will get one question a term or so to reflect his importance, and then it will be down to tickets in a hat.
Since there are only 15 organisations questions per week, that's something under 500 per annum or one and a bit per backbench MP, then it is down to the bunny hopping.
But my MP Mr Anderson seems to appear a lot more than that.
In many blocks of flats, sold in London, it has become standard to have hefty locks on the bedroom doors, as built. With the keyholes discretely in the door handles themselves. Funny that.
This is another issue with excessive/complex regulation.
Comply and you end up with a good chance going bust and losing everything as you have to compete on price with those cheating.
Cheat and you probably get away with it because many or most are cheating (see above) and you are unlikely to be caught as the council have to pay for so many bureaucrats to administer the various regulations and their index linked pensions, that short of the place burning down, they are unlikely to have the resources to enforce anything much.
You may find that after many years of Pantomime Government by the Conservatives that the public is only too grateful for a bit of normal, competent government from Starmer. That could lead to him becoming rather more popular. If that happens, the leftish policies you seek may be a while coming.
That is not however an argument against them being put forward. That is both legitimate and desireable.
Normally, the losing party’s held majorities decrease, the winning party’s held majorities increase, and those seats of the losing party with small majorities flip to small majorities of the other side.
This time, the second one of those simply didn’t happen, bunching up all the seats with small majorities.
The outcome of the election was so certain, that non-Tory voters in Labour held seats could relax and vote however they liked. For a few seats this was for a left-leaning independent, in some it was for the LibDems, or more commonly the Greens. For many, it was for Reform, and I suspect that Farage’s pull in many Labour held seats is a big part of the explanation - which isn’t what the lead’s author, nor I, would welcome, because it tells us that Labour isn’t delivering the right policy stance for many of its supporters - but not because it is insufficiently left wing.
For the author and the wider left, they only way they progress in these seats - without a change in voting system - is if the Tories stay flat on their backs and another big Labour win looks assured.
The reason (behind the dogma facade) that it was privatised in the first place was that the treasury couldn't afford the massive capital costs to modernise. They haven't gone away you know.
An alternative such as John Lewis model where the customers become partners might be more sustainable. Or a private company where the government own a 31% share, customers own another 30% and no takeovers unless 75% of shareholders agree written into primary legislation might be more sustainable.
My gripe is, as a fellow lefty, you need to be clear who the enemy is: Starmer's Labour may be too centrist, too cautious for you but they are not your enemy, the Tories and Reform are.
Better to have a government open to arguments from the Left than one virulently opposed to them.
Law Commission considers moving point at which criminal proceedings are 'active' to charge rather than arrest.
The Law Commission is seeking views on whether a case should be considered “active” from charge instead of arrest – potentially expanding the scope of what the media can report during a criminal investigation.
Currently legal proceedings are considered active in criminal cases from the point of arrest. But because arrests are now treated as private, and therefore secret, it has become hard for publishers to know if their reporting is potentially risking contempt of court.
The Commission noted media stakeholders said it has become harder to ascertain whether proceedings are active unless the journalists know through other sources who has been arrested, because police no longer share the identity of a suspect until they are charged.
The News Media Association told the Commission that “often the media are unaware that an arrest has taken place and it can be difficult to verify this as this information is no longer routinely confirmed by police forces following ZXC”, a reference to a case against Bloomberg that reached the Supreme Court which ruled a person under criminal investigation should not be named before charge.
The Commission said: “As a result, there is a chilling effect because the media cannot publish information about a person for fear that the person may be under arrest, but there is no way they can know with any certainty.
“Additionally, it was explained to us that the bar for arrest can be very low, whereas the bar for charging presents a higher threshold, and a lot of arrests do not lead to charge.
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/secret-arrests-could-mean-publishers-dont-know-they-are-in-contempt-of-court/
In reality, the Greens are an alliance between socialists & NIMBYs, who’s de-growth agenda & bias to localism leads to them opposing the actual Green transition we need to have.
PS, I assume you, and the Press Gazette, meant it this way round: moving to arrest rather than charge.
I'm astonished at how well the Greens did in winning four seats under FPTP.
It will be fascinating to see what happens next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youlgrave_Waterworks
It's also allegedly one of the best little known wild swimming spots in Derbyshire:
https://shegetsaround.co.uk/the-best-wild-swimming-spots-in-youlgreave-peak-district/
I live about 40 minutes away and I didn't know; I thought the closest was Chatsworth or Slippery Stones.
A lot of the issue probably comes down to how the loans are going to be secured and the impact of any haircut on the existing loans...
They allow commentary throughout, but have a far more extensive Jury checking / challenge process - expecting jurors to be able to take more responsibility for their objectivity.
It was surely due to disillusioned Tories and non-Tory voters in Tory held seats voting for the party they thought most likely to eject the Tory MP.
Greens have got a shot over Labour’s boughs
Did you change bows to boughs as trees are more appropriate for a reference to Greens ?
Firstly, if it wanted to - and it would be entirely stupid to do so - HMG could pay £100bn for Thames Water. The UK has a good credit rating. It can print money. It could pay 50x the "right" price and buy it, if it wanted to.
Secondly, the most likely scenario where HMG takes ownership of Thames Water is where it misses an interest payment. At which point, the administrators are called, the shareholders are wiped out, and the bondholders accept - say - 50 cents on the dollar. Thames Water, pre interest payments, is highly profitable. It is just massively over-leveraged. Which is shit for the people who lent money to it. But... so what? The shareholders lose everything, the bond holders lose half their money... and water continues to flow.
Looking at the provided link - https://greenparty.org.uk/2024/07/06/10-steps-labour-must-take-in-the-first-100-days-to-show-theyre-serious-about-real-change/ - I see that six of the ten things that the Greens want are nothing to do with environmental issues. And one of those: "Introduce a natural history GCSE" seems incredibly trivial.
Regardless of the worthiness of those six items, I'd have expected a Green party to, you know, have more to say on green issues. Which reinforces my view that much of the Green party is just a greenwashing of a hard-left agenda.
I'm also really doubtful that: "Labour (is) firmly positioning itself as a centre / right party." I think we'll see a fair amount which the left will quite like - although it may take some time for these to become apparent.
He described it as a magnificent example of why philosophical logic was important in real life. An example of a statement that imparts a very different truth to the one the speaker intended.
When this kind of model is proposed it always has a feel to me of playing accounting games. If the government is effectively borrowing or paying for something, we shouldn't engage in financial contortions purely to keep sums off the official "government borrowing" or "government expenditure" totals -- what does it achieve in reality? And if there's a long term investment case where putting in capital now will achieve a return in the longer term such that private investers might stump up some cash, shouldn't the government (whose borrowing costs are probably lower) be in favour of making that investment itself?
As you say, the requirement for capital costs hasn't gone away -- where will the money come from? The government could tax the general population more, they could put Thames Water customers' bills up, or both. I'm not sure adding private investors to the mix gains much, and last time around it largely resulted in them sucking money out of the arrangement, to the detriment of the people the water infrastructure is supposed to serve...
How well do limited by guarantee companies scale up?
The rural seats probably won't come back now until they either do something really stupid or there is a Conservative government in the offing again.
Brighton and Bristol are probably there for good.
I thought we were just about starting to consider that instead of pissing money up the wall on tailored British kit we would get to buying proven good kit off the shelf. Trebles all round at BAe I guess.
*Armed forces minister Luke Pollard.
Election felt very much like: choose your ejection mechanism for the Tories, SNP and (even) the DUP to an extent.
Incidentally, a relative's farm (not a million miles away from a major conurbation) has a private water supply from a well. They're still not massively uncommon for farms and the like. Water companies seem to not like them, though,
Well cast iron is brittle and Cameron had a habit of making 'cast iron' pledges of a referendum on the Lisbon treaty and reducing net immigration to the tens of thousands.
This was due to the presence of firms who operated on a large scale, cash in hand. They paid no tax and sweated the labour. They made every short cut possible and left houses in a dangerous condition.
A favourite was to bring labour from a foreign country (generally the same country as the owner), carefully selected to speak no English. Often forced to sleep on the building sites themselves, when bought over. Many were injured.
When he tried bringing it to the attention of senior politicians and some civil servants he was, politely, told nothing could/would be done. Building control signed off the buildings…
The parallels with the garment trade in Leicester are of note.
How naive of me.
Of course there is also a potential alternative explanation for the high green / left parties vote - and it was discussed on LRB podcast I listened too. Left voters essentially had permission to vote with further left because the collapse of the Conservatives. The Conservative message of a “supermajority” took the jeopardy out of the vote. In a closer contest this may not be the case.
Although worth remembering that once a voter has played away (so to speak) they tend to be more willing to do it again.
1) Is the green socialism you espouse consistent with regular elections where after 5 years such a government can be replaced with one which reverses it all?
2) Which large state is the best example of successfully implementing your policies?
3) Is NATO for now necessary, desirable, neither or both?
4) What would socialism do about state debt and borrowing?
5) What % of GDP should be state managed?
It’s worth pointing out that in the scenario above - 50% of Thames Water’s debts evaporate - overnight it goes from a troubled business to one in rude health, financially.
It would be worth protecting *suppliers*, I think, since if some of them are exposed to loss, this could have a ripple effect that might cause damage. Though if I was supplying Thames Water, I would be asking for immediate payment before shipment.
Any 'blame' would thus be given to the company rather than the government.
As the company was supposed to owned by small shareholders in this country any profits would recycle back into the economy.
While regulators would ensure the system remained balanced.
Weak regulators and the entry of foreign private equity seems to have led to have been a bad combination.
Streeting may draw the more obvious conclusion that voters don't care who is actually doing what in the NHS as long as they don't have to wait eight hours for an ambulance.
Or Miliband may be too scared of the numerous small majorities in key areas to take on the NIMBYs.
If Starmer is sensible, he'll go for competence and try to steady the ship. That in itself is a pretty formidable challenge and if he can pull it off popularity will follow.
What should be avoided is bills also going up to bail out shareholders or bondholders who have an insolvent structure given the size of current interest payments (before the need for capital investment).
Once the current shareholders are wiped out and bondholders have a significant haircut on the value of bonds, then both public and private investment in the company becomes possible in conjunction with bill rises for future capital expenditure. That investment should be able to generate positive returns net of the cost of financing it if properly structured.
This doesn't need to become a big headache for Starmer.
“Chris Weston, who joined as chief executive in January, received a £195,000 bonus for the three months to the end of March, taking his total pay to £437,000 during a period when Britain’s largest water utility has been battling to avoid nationalisation. Weston said the bonus was based “purely on performance” as Thames “needed to be able to attract the best talent to the company”.
I love that logic - I have to get lots of money so that the company can attract someone who can do the job at least as badly as me.
The CFO got £1.33m in case you are interested in where the priorities are.
I think you have perhaps underweighed a factor I am beginning to see in a few commentaries - that a lot of people voted against Labour to take out Tories, so there is a hidden tactical vote of indeterminate size which supports a Labour Government. I need to see numbers on that, which I do not think are around yet. That stands against the claims about Starmer having a weak mandate because 'he only had a third of votes on a low turnout'.
On the Greens, I am on the other side - I regard them as quite practical locally and rather loopy at national level, with a habit of knee jerks. I still recall Baroness Jenny responding to the Jean Charles de Menezes incident by making a comparison between the Met and the Syrian Secret Police, which is simply unhinged (in the absence of, say, evidence of mass graves of protestors found on Hampstead Heath). However much I support the line on other things, I can't ignore that.
There's a related issue that the Greens are all about "we must stop economic growth", but have not afaics ever engaged with the significant reductions in energy intensity of GDP - for example from 106 to 77 metric tons of oil equivalent per million GBP GDP in just a decade from 2012 to 2022. * I think my numbers are right on that.
Nor have they really engaged with the shift from "making" to "mind-work".
I'm probably with you that the GP need to work out what they want to be, but I'd be looking for a move more towards the position occupied by German Greens. I don't see that a capital-L Left position (say from Corbyn leftwards) has, or justifies, any future.
In your position, I think there is also a problem with a tension between Liberal Left and the Revolutionary Left. IMO Laurie Penny notably impaled herself on that divide when she was trying to promote herself as a "journalist on behalf of student protesters" back around 2010, and was a subject of merciless satire as a 'liberal'.
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/552343/import-dependency-primary-fuels-uk/
Find the best drones and if they are Chinese just copy them and don’t buy the rights, see if they appreciate it for a change but set up a factory that can make variants in good numbers that can be scaled up easily - build it on a site where say a steel mill is closed so nobody gives a crap about planning issues and you can fill the jobs.
By insisting on spending on British companies it provides a potential dodge for spending so they can do a big capital project that’s actually political and claim it’s for the defence effort - see G Brown and aircraft carriers.
It's a nazi thing
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0QKEl3_L2yw
I’m not.
There's a huge water tank dated 1829 in the middle of the village, which is I think the origin - setup by the Womens Friendly Society.
https://letsgopeakdistrict.co.uk/listing/youlgreave/
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1751601,-1.6865945,3a,57.3y,354.02h,84.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3SUPKZ81lzf8UL29Qy7msQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu
2) Consider reality in purchasing. Instead of trying to buy a few of the most expensive, buy something cheap enough to be useful.
3) From 3 - your orders might then be big enough to get workshare or even a factory.
4) When collaborating on an international program, claim that you are going to buy 3x amount you really are. The German love doing this.
For example, if the MoD bought 500 Archer artillery systems, we could actually afford them. They work (proven in Ukraine). And if we put in an order for 500, we would get the right to demand a factory gets built for them in the U.K.
As I understand, the underlying business is profitable, so the administrators should be able to sell it to somebody with no effect on services to end customers. It's only a mixture of the owners and lenders who get wiped out - to which the correct response is "hard cheese".
British defence contractors are quite capable of producing very good kit, alongside the hyper inflated rubbish.
Note that Labour are going to conduct a year long defence review before they ramp up spending from its current levels. I'd suspend judgment until you see what they actually Dom rather than assuming they'll just continue in the manner of the last couple of decades.
It's called administration.
The major issues at Thames Water stem from its time under the ownership of Australian firm Macquarie. They borrowed money to buy it, transferred that money to Thames Water illegally using a Cayman Islands subsidiary, and then sold their shares at a fat profit.
And where was the regulator, who should have stopped them doing so, then blocked the sale until it had been undone? Nowhere.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41152516
So one problem is that the current owners might sue on the basis the government has been negligent (which it has, although so have they) if it is renationalised.
Is there any good regulator of utilities out there? OFGEM are equally hopeless which is why so many of our power companies behave in ways the Camorra would blink at.
I absolutely agree we make good kit but we don’t make all kit so there cannot be any dogmatic approach if deciding we need kit x and then waiting for a British defence contractor to say “we can knock that up” if there is already a brilliant one available from South Korea or Turkey. If we can, buy manufacturing rights with no export allowed so it justifies setting up a factory but they need to choose the best kit available for what we need at the best price and whether the money stays in the UK or not should be way down the list of imperatives.
However it was not a result showing a desire for socialism either. The LDs won more seats under Davey than Charles Kennedy had focusing on centre right liberal Remain seats in the South. Starmer won more seats than Corbyn ever did in 2017 or 2019 and he also won a majority which Melenchon's block failed to do in France
One thing that does bother me about them is how much their performance seems to depend on who their leader is, which suggests the underlying structure is weak. This is complicated by the fact that rather too many chief inspectors have been appointed on the basis of who they know (and in at least one case, who they were sleeping with) rather than any innate ability.
But if Ofgem or Ofwat had been operating at the standards of OFSTED, even in its worst days under Spielman, it is in fact unimaginable that they would be in this shit (literally) now.
The same is true of CV90 armoured vehicles we chose not to buy, going for a gold-plated custom solution instead. At a cost of billions extra.
The Army programme management needs some serious sorting out.
Both the Greens and Reform got on the scoreboard in a material way and the excellent thread header demonstrates that there is indeed potential for that to grow substantially. Just remember that logic applies to Reform much more than the Greens given their larger vote and significant number of second places.
What I fear from this is that the centre has been weakened. The absurd efficiency of the Labour vote has hidden that to some extent but @148grss has demonstrated the underlying effect. I do not want a politics that is influenced by either the extreme left or right. But that is where we may be heading once people become disillusioned by Starmer’s lack of a magic wand.
They were absolutely notorious in New Labour's authoritarian phase, especially combined with excessive vetting-and-barring.
Voters for the Labour or Green parties are never going to be persuaded to vote Conservative – so if they are the only voters Conservatives panders to they will alienate more of their right wing and parties like Reform will grow.
Or is big finance deemed more important than small shareholders ?
Which is true across the world, not just here. Look at US, or Israel, or France, or Greece. Or indeed the autocracies like Russia or China.
The world is a very unhappy and unsettled place right now.
Surely we should ensure we have a few bits of kit that are so good, the world wants to buy them? Then we can go buy other proven good kit off the shelf. Everyone happy.
So what are our world beaters of the next 10 - 20 years?
I don't think it right to look at only one side of the Tactical Voting movement and say a lot of Labour voters supported Green/LD/Indy, without acknowledging the reverse. In a lot of seats the Green/LD vote was squeezed in favour of Labour. Indeed because of the relative numbers of seats (412 vs 72 +4) most likely more Lab seats benefited than LD/GP
The proponents of AJAX should be forced to drive BMP-2 for the rest of their lives. With the doors filled, not with diesel, but FOOF.
Hopefully England bat first and I get it finished today.
Oh Jimmy Jimmy, Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Anderson.
Of course, that does indirectly affect a lot of people who could be considered small shareholders.
Edit - in fact it seems it may have been Addington, who was also the last Speaker to become Prime Minister.