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If Lab doesn't succeed perhaps the voters will turn to somebody other than the Tories?
If Lab doesn't succeed perhaps the voters will turn to somebody other than the Tories?– politicalbetting.com
That's why the change frame was so powerful last July and why the new government has faced such backlash for being seen to be not having delivered change/ changing things too slowly. pic.twitter.com/cPOxpaLqVC
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Then we'll have nobody in Westminster and be netter off
Maduro proposes using Brazilian troops to “liberate” Puerto Rico from US rule.
https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1878757349399441581
The clattering crap of Reform won't be it though.
The current Tory party are only marginally better than Labour. I'd hope that they really up their game in the next couple of years, but I doubt they will.
But hey, the job is clearly vacant, and the application process is one where you have almost no other candidates.
But that isn't true of three other things, which are looking fatal. First is terrible communication of the narrative and trajectory, which is just fundamental to modern politics. And they could have just asked Blair and Campbell on the quiet how it's done.
Second is the sense of being taken by surprise by the mess we all knew was there and the apparent absence of a coherent plan.
Third, and worst by far is kicking Dilnot/social care (2011) to 2028 and after. This says in very large capital letters "We are not serious, we never had a plan, and we think you are all fools for voting for us".
Therefore at this moment as a usually Tory for 50 years, voting Labour in 2024, I won't even think about voting for either party until something changes bigly.
He should really have got this sorted years ago. Thatcher had voice coaching, as I recall.
I think we all thought they had some kind of A Plan. And I admit I got worried in the GE campaign that everything was too cautious and policy-lite, but I eventually voted for them because I put that down to bad political tactics. But it is starting to very much look they did not have A Plan. Which to say they must have seriously had one eye on government at least since Partygate (which was the first rumblings that the end of Tory rule could be nigh) is pretty inexcusable.
It’s a democratic deficit.
Politicians have, for decades, declared that deference is dead, society must change, that the will of the people is sovereign.
The problem is that at the same time, on immigration and various other topics, The Order of Things is announced to be beyond the reach of politics. They are legal/human rights issue, untouchable and sacrosanct.
In addition, the government has created a whole range of obligations and unfunded requirements that hedge in every action. See the vast tidal wave of paper required for even minor infrastructure.
So you have the Unstoppable Cannonball of Popular Democracy and the Unbreakable Wall of That Which Must Be.
He is absolutely appalling at selling a vision.
He could be announcing the magic gun policy that would get the economy booming, fix the NHS and education, give us a world beating railway service, abolish income tax and ban pineapple on pizzas and it would still sound like the lamest policy imaginable.
If I’d been Labour Chancellor, I’d have gone with merging employee NI and income tax, and reforming and simplifying the tax bands. With a bit of a bump in actual tax paid - “Need to raise tax to save the NHS. Hopefully, later, we can reduce rates when the crisis is passed.”
The equalisation of taxation between salary and other income sources would be presented as fairness
A simplified tax system would be harder to avoid and cheaper to administer.
The markets would have been happier with that. As would, I suspect, many Labour members.
On pensions I would have gone for throwing everything except the actual state pension in a pot, stirring and coming out with a simplified means tested (based on taxation?) extra benefits. WFA would have gone in the pot
And not come out….
Again, sell as a rework to target benefits at the needy - more for the poor. Markets would probably like that, as would Labour members.
Where's Labour's narrative and self-proclaimed mission? It wasn't effectively laid out before the election and hasn't been build since.
After meeting President Trump in Mar-a-Lago, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says Canada should prepare for 25% tariffs starting on Jan 20 on all US-bound products, ***including on crude oil***.
"I'm not expecting any exemptions," she told reporters
It's sad that it matter, but it does. Blair could do it well; so could Cameron. May was better than Brown; even Sunak was better than Starmer in this regard - though all he had to sell was some rancid butter.
I'm excluding the Lib Dems from that group as they're both of fairly recent vintage as a governing party and also mainstream establishment. However, it's telling that the highest Con+Lab share this year in any poll is just 53%. As TSE noted in a thread the other day, there's a decent chance the next election ends up with no party near a majority and 4-6 blocks of quite sizeable numbers.
wibble wibble
flip flop
Lammy too apparently
So the sense that both traditional parties of government are as poison to the electorate - getting between them about half the votes when not long ago it was 85% - has to have a rationale somewhere. And I suggest that it is because a lot of people - perhaps almost everyone apart from their irremovable base - think neither are fit to govern.
So that screwed up the reform side of things because it wasn’t as simple as 5p off Ni and 3p on income tax attached to your plan I it would have been 3p on income tax and then your changes on top
But the one thing I think we can agree on is that RR simply isn’t doing enough to fix any of the problems we have and kicking social care to 2028 shows they know there are big problems but they can’t see how to fix them
Starmer is hopeless at politics
Who would invest in Britain on these terms? 🥴
At the very least I expected a revaluation to have been announced but no, not a peep.
He has no vision of where he wants to take the country and as a result cannot communicate and take people with him.
The problem is that Boris and the Conservatives more generally lied their assess off. They said they cared about reducing immigration and then didn't. They promised Brexit as the solution, and then massively increased immigration, because Brexit 'solving' immigration was just one of many lies about Brexit. It's not a democratic deficit, it's a Conservative Party deficit that they both wanted to talk about immigration as being high to drive up their vote, but they didn't actually want to stop their own policies that had driven immigration high. They have now paid the price by losing votes to Reform UK and suffering their worst ever election defeat.
The one thing Greens and Reform have in common is their populism.
Hence why no one wants to go near it and why I always end up going for the tax on house price logic because anything else will reveal how well off London is compared to elsewhere
Truss removing the social care levy has a lot to blame for here - it would have been nice to have a separate tax that could be used tax pensioners with.
So now the bond traders can test how he means it.
"a lamentable lack of action on genuine crime": prison releases are a necessary result of the Tories' failures.
"a massive increase in boat arrivals": hasn't been massive; Labour are deporting more than the Tories did.
"bunging £9bn at someone for them to take a colony from us": another Tory policy
Will people pick it out as a pivotal moment a year from now? Probably not. Could it feed into the general feeling that the government is a bit rubbish, quite possibly. Starmer showed tremendous political naivety by not confirming she’d stay as chancellor as soon as he was asked.
The most important news today is probably what williamglenn posted at 5:08.
It's the right thing to do.
And it won't cost the Government many votes either since they didn't win many votes from that demographic anyway.
So what have they got to lose?
So Starmer won't do it. Because he's shit, no other reason.
I have said this before, but he also has a very weak way of starting responses with a “of course it’s right that you ask that” or something of that nature. You’re immediately legitimising the other point of view, it brings you down to the level of the questioner. Not a strong way of dealing with questions.
He's PM. The buck stops with him. He needs to take some responsibility.
"New York, where I live, and Florida, where I often visit, provide an interesting contrast.
They have comparable populations — New York with about 20 million people, Florida with 23 million. But New York state’s budget is more than double that of Florida ($239 billion vs. roughly $116 billion). New York City, which is a little more than three times the size of Miami-Dade County, has a budget of more than $100 billion, which is nearly 10 times that of Miami-Dade. New York City’s spending grew from 2012 to 2019 by 40 percent, four times the rate of inflation. Does any New Yorker feel that they got 40 percent better services during that time?"
source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/04/new-york-florida-liberal-failure/
BTW, New York and California have much higher rates of homelessness than Florida and Texas: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-AHAR-Part-1.pdf
(Labour supporters dressed as Vikings sing) "shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit, shiiiit. Wonderful shit"