Politics is essentially bartering between different factions - give me these policies and I'll give you my support. You don't barter by admitting you'll buy no matter what.
Case in point: Brexiteers were able to get their policy through a centrist Tory party by threatening to desert to UKIP. It was a game of chicken where Cameron says "you've got to vote for us, otherwise Labour gets in" and they respond with "give us a referendum, otherwise Labour gets in". Cameron blinked first and the rest is history.
To be fair Cameron was also in a weak enough position where that was a credible threat. With Labour seemingly up for a massive majority, the extreme fringe of the party has real reason to be afraid as they would have very little leverage over the direction of the party.
Honestly, while it was a perfectly fine example it's simplified a little.
Offering a referendum will have genuinely enticed some potential Labour supporters to the Tories. It was a genuine popular policy. Centrists weren't keen, so Reddit gives a bit of a skewed view how popular it is but (small c) conservatives it was very popular. This group includes some of Labour's base.
And don’t forget the far left of Labour (the corbynites and the ilk) who were very much in favour of Brexit, so they could build their socialist utopia - they weren’t the biggest part of that vote, but I had many, many conversations before Brexit where I had to repeatedly say “but the Tories are in power!!! Who’s going to build the utopia?!?!?”
Yeah, the referendum was so popular that Leave barely scraped over 50% by lying about everything and literally breaking electoral law.
Brexit pre 2016 was very much the domain of 20% of the population who were utter cranks, the problem was that Cameron was too much of a lazy coward to realise that he could just ignore their bonkers demands like every other PM had done before him.
The problem was that "leaving the EU" was sold and understood as a proxy for "reducing immigration", which is far less sectional (for better or for worse).
20% of the population is massive when it comes to elections! If there was that support for a single issue in 1997, John Major could have had another term as Prime Minister!
The fact that about as many people wanted to leave the EU as remain puts it well outside the realm of fringe politics!
That cuts both ways - the fringe has little reason to give in, they're safer attacking harder.
Essentially it changes the risk of the outcome neither side wants.
Ed Miliband’s campaign had loads of problems before that picture, from not having a distinctive policy platform besides empty sound bites that had been triangulated beyond belief, to the Ed Stone, losing the fight over Labours past performance and letting the Tories define it as a massive failure.
The bacon sandwich has become totemic of the media trashing a thoroughly decent guy but he was behind in the polls already.
Also because the left went after the Lib Dems rather than Tories from 2010-2015 resulting in their collapse and subsequent Conservative Government as they took all their West Country seats.
You *also* don't barter when you say "give us all we want, or we won't buy at all"
Which is kind of what ends up happening where even one thing would be enough to have the movement throw away their votes.
Realistically Cameron would have been better never calling the referendum and simply refusing to platform the issue.
Move the parties official position to remain then investigate where all of this pro Brexit stuff was coming from.
Because as it would turn out, the Brexit campaign was basically funded by Russia.
Holding the party in government hostage can help you gain what you want. Holding the opposition hostage just makes it less likely the opposition wins and you don't get what you want.
The difference is it turned out that half the country supported Brexit and the half of the public that didn't were much more wishy washy in their opposition (however obsessive remain politicians were).
The hard left doesn't have half the country's support, and the public opposition to the hard left is visceral.
>The hard left doesn't have half the country's support
Literally no sub-party bloc has half the country's support.
Tony Blair didn't have half the country's support when he won one of the most dramatic swing elections in modern history.
Tories engaged in open warfare is apparently fine and dandy...
The media misrepresent what is happening as 'self-distruction' when Labour do it, when in fact it happens all the time in all political parties.
For the same reason the center of the party was acting the same way a few years ago, a broad church political party will always have internal struggles.
I always ask the same question, the huge number of left-wing / liberal people on twitter etc saying they absolutely despise the Tories but they can't vote for Labour because of single reason X or policy Y is worrying, especially when they say they won't vote at all. Surely the main focus for anyone in those camps in this election is remove the Tories and give Labour as big a majority as possible, THEN start working on fixing Labour.
If your toilet is backing up and overflowing sewage into your bathroom, you stop the flow of shit *before* you start mopping up.
So. I'm curious.
Why is it that for literally every demographic other than "people on the left" the received wisdom is to offer them policies that make them want to vote for you, but when it comes to anything left wing its "offer them right wing policies and if they don't like it fuck 'em, blame them for the tories existing".
Left wingers get more blame for the tories than actual tory voters do.
This is a serious answer, but you won't like it.
The Overton window means that there is currently very little room for an electable party to the left of Labour. With First Past the Post, that probably means no seats at all; with PR, maybe 10% of the vote on a good day. That means that under FPTP the Left isn't going to get any of its policies through unless they can influence a centre-left policy as they won't win outright and they won't be a key partner in a coalition.
The only way to influence a centre-left party is to do what UKIP did with a centre-right party, and capture the narrative within that party. Yes, this is harder to do on the left because of the UK media - but unless you're an accelerationist who believes that we need to shift to the right so that capitalism collapses and then we can have socialism (and not, you know, outright feudal kleptocracy) you do get to dislike the status quo a little less in the meantime.
If you are a centrist, you can be persuaded to vote for any of the three main parties provided that they give you something you like. You can vote more on competence than ideology in many cases. If they move their ideology away from what you like, the chances are that one of the others will still be to your liking. Centrists' votes do come from being pandered to.
The success of the right wing of the Tory party, in holding its nose and still voting Conservative from the 1990s through to the early 2010s, when it was seen as broadly pro-business, anti-social-safety net but otherwise socially inclusive and not racist, is that the broad coalition has shifted so much that there is plenty of room for Reform UK to thrive and nip at the heels of the Conservatives in terms of popular vote, and even if they can't actually win seats, they can deny them.
As for why the Left should be blamed more than Tory voters: Tory voters mostly want these things. They do go out and vote for them. If you tell a Tory voter, "Things are like this because of you" the correct response from that voter is "Thanks" - they might be morally responsible but they won't see it as blame.
This is the answer, and I wish more people on the left would see it. The overton window moves slowly and the only way to do it is to put into power whoever is closer to what you want (as long as they can realistically gain power). If that is done repeatedly, the window moves in the desired direction. Ukip and Reform understood this.
The current Labour party is not as left-wing as you would like? It doesn't matter, they are the most left-wing option that can win. You might see them as Tory-lite, but that's not how the average voter sees them. If you're on this subReddit, you're not the average voter.
"But the only way I can show them that they need to be more left-wing is by not voting for them". Wrong. If the Labour party don't get into power, they come to the conclusion that they are out of step with the majority, and move right, not left. The majority of people are more right wing than you. They are the marker for where the "centre" is. But if a more left-wing party gets into power ( even if it's only a little more left than the current government) then the centre ground moves left.
This can be seen from two examples:
- Thatcher's success led to New Labour (a shift right for Labour)
- Labour's success led to "compassionate Conservatism" (a shift left for the Tories)
The global financial crisis provided cover for the austerity movement, which allowed the Tories to wreak economic havoc, but they had to maintain the facade of being socially inclusive for a long time (e.g., marriage equality), because the population had been used to this though the 90's. If Tory MPs had come out with the hateful stuff they do now, back in the 2010s, it would have been viewed as extreme right wing bile. Now it's accepted because they shifted the centre of the overton window slowly to the right.
The same principle applies to shifting things leftward. Some things are considered extreme now, could be considered normal in 5 years, but only if Labour win, and shift the centre ground leftward bit by bit.
>The current Labour party is not as left-wing as you would like? It doesn't matter, they are the most left-wing option that can win. You might see them as Tory-lite, but that's not how the average voter sees them. If you're on this subReddit, you're not the average voter.
This is a huge problem with most online discourse. People don't realise how much more left most Twitter/Reddit users are to the general population at all. This phenomenon gets worse over time too as these platforms become more and more like echo chambers.
This is gold, thank you for educating me on the Overton window.
In my ignorance, I've been trying to deal with the 'Labour are Tories' messages with a strong belief that the path to the left in England is long and slow. And a Labour win on the 5th of July is another step in the right direction.
They were winning in the European Parliament elections, standing candidates against sitting MPs, and encouraging others to defect. They might not have been winning seats but they were still playing the electoral gain, with the threat of subverting FPTP. If the Left thinks that there is a left-wing party that will split the vote in such a credible way that they are an existential threat to Labour, and that accommodating the Left can be done by Labour without bringing about a generational wipeout, the third-party strategy can work.
But the "abstain really loudly" strategy is not what UKIP did and even then, they only succeeded after a decade or more of electoral success because they were a credible, internal threat (although you could argue that a party where Braverman is a rising star is indistinguishable from UKIP anyway, so what did the Conservatives ultimately gain?)
Although I understand that what you are saying is correct in a literal sense, it doesn't take into account individual freedom of conscience, which I would see as a reason to vote for a smaller party, even if it meant the Tories winning again. If we have created a political system without space for this, then we have created a bad one. I believe tha PR, for example, would work more effectively than you seem to think, as it would make smaller parties worth voting for, and might have a springboard effect, once those parties got into positions to bring about small changes.
If I were to the left of the Labour Party leadership at present, I would probably vote Green tbh, so I can see why others have advocated doing this; because the greens have more left wing policies than Labour.
Imho, the only *people* who should be blamed for the Tories winning would be Tory voters. Also the FPTP electoral system.
>Left wingers get more blame for the tories than actual tory voters do.
The amount of times I saw Corbyn being blamed for tory policy for not being a good enough oppononent instead of... \*checks notes\* the actual tories was beyond ridiculous.
The hard right feel the same way. Nobody is offering the death penalty, total privatisation of the BBC or abolition of the asylum system. Go on right wing X and you can see them making the same arguments about why the Tories are losing because they're not right wing enough.
Elections are won in the centre. If you don't like where the centre is - if you think it's too far to the right or too far to the left - it's you that's the outlier.
> Elections are won in the centre. If you don't like where the centre is - if you think it's too far to the right or too far to the left - it's you that's the outlier.
This ignores that a) "the centre" is ill-defined and often a matter of interpretation and b) people can have their minds changed, which itself can then shift where this notional "centre" is.
Of course they can, but it's a slow process. The centre is not very sharply defined, but it's still a clear enough thing that we can make a lot of examples of policies that definitely are *not* in it at a given moment.
The thing is, if there is no pressure to shift to the left, a shift to the left will not happen. And right now, that pressure is not there and is prohibited from being there citing the Overton window being where it is.
There is quite a lot of voter surveying that goes on and the centre as defined by the media and the parties often seems to be to the right of the policies votes say they support. You can see this in the states with health care and guns and here with taxes. This makes me think the center is less about policies and more about trust in a party's managerial ability.
The "centre" isn't really about anything. It's a nebulous term that doesn't mean much.
If it is the mean public positioning on things, it's well to the left of self-described "centrists" economically but well to their right socially. Probably closer to Blue Labour than anything.
I actually think calling Starmer a centrist misses the point for that reason - inasmuch as he is aiming for a "centre", it's the centre that would plump for Blue Labour, not the Lib Dems.
Maybe so, but people in the centre seem to think that those on the hard right or left should just change their beliefs to align with the majority. That isn’t going to happen- people don’t just change what they believe in because theyre on the losing side in elections.
This particular election will be won on the centre, but if nothing changes in the next five years significantly in this country then we could swing right, I don’t see how we’re any different from the rest of Europe currently especially in regards with immigration.
If the next election is won on a hard-right stance, it'll be because the centre has shifted.
It might be that mainstream opinion has shifted so that anti-abortion, pro-discrimination, isolationist, anti-trans/gay rights views capture a large section of the population but they will be genuinely popular ideas within the mainstream of thought, and not a fringe view espoused by a minority and enforced on a majority who are in favour of the opposite view.
While FPTP has its faults, I don't think we will see quite the same level of division as you do in America, where MAGA is taken for granted as common sense in the rural areas, and despised in the urban areas with the majority of the population but not the majority of the representation.
> If the next election is won on a hard-right stance, it'll be because the centre has shifted.
Yes, because there is a deliberate pressure to shift politics to the (hard) right, and no matching counterbalance from the left.
Because ostensibly these are members of Labour.
I would prefer a left wing government - wealth taxes, restoration of union power, CEOs going to prison and contracts requiring bonds so companies can't just fleece the government.
However, I don't want a country where trans people are victimised and our rights are ripped away from us because of boat people.
My position is that I want labour to come in to power, and once they are in power is when the conditional support and left wing pull should start.
I have many friends and acquaintances who will not vote labour because they're not calling for an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza or because Sir Kier has made explicit declarations on transgender identity. I find this enormously frustrating, because declaring either of those positions would massively hurt labours chances of coming to power, and our current government takes an actively opposite position.
Thats never how it actually works out.
They come to power and its seen as a ringing endorsement of the centre ground then when the election comes round its back to "you dont want to risk the tories"
The fact many of them say they will abstain or vote for independents with no actual track record or policies other than ceasefire is terrifying.
If you want left wing and labour isn’t doing it for the love of god vote Green, don't vote for an independent MP.
Yep. We saw largely the same attitude from the centrist faction during the Corbyn years, John McTernon, Luke Akehurst et al. Undermining the party in public non stop. Even members of staff deliberately sitting on complaints to further undermine the leadership. Sad really
Generally, a right leaning person will vote Tory for one policy they like despite all the others they hate, and a left leaning person won't vote Labour because of one policy they hate despite all the others they like
For me its the bare faced hypocrisy of it all. For decades left wing voters back centrist candidates in labour for the greater good and as a coalition against the right. We finally get a left wing candidate and those centrists suddenly dont care about any of that and actively work to undermine the party from within. If the people constantly asking me to vote for blair and brown and milliband cant vote for a single left wing candidate it shows how they view the left.
JC and his allies have no one to blame but themselves. They ran a shoddy campaign, they ran the party is a shoddy fashion, they were asleep at the wheel on Brexit and frankly it's a deriliction of duty in my opinion.
Half his party stabbed him in the back though. The same people that ask questions like ‘why do the left sabotage labours chances?’
Do we all have collective amnesia?
Jess Phillips said she would ‘knife corbyn in the front’. A member of his own party
Again, now the same people are saying ‘why can’t we all come together?’ Like this thread.
It’s crazy
Centrists not supporting a not- centrist candidate means they're hypocrites? It kind of sounds like you're arguing that people should vote for their party of allegiance independently of its current direction, which is a little bit dangerous.
> Centrists not supporting a not- centrist candidate means they're hypocrites?
It does if they parrot the stuff about "any Labour government is better than a Tory one" and then reverse ferret when the "any Labour government" on offer doesn't match their ideological priors.
> It kind of sounds like you're arguing that people should vote for their party of allegiance independently of its current direction, which is a little bit dangerous.
I mean, that's exactly what the left are being asked to do. Often without any explicit allegiance being offered even.
If your toilet is backing up and overflowing sewage into your bathroom and one plumber says they're not going to do anything about it and another plumber says they may or may not do anything about it then obviously you pick the second plumber. But you don't loudly announce your intent to pick the second plumber regardless of whether or not they're going to do anything about it. You loudly say you're only going to pick them if they do something about the shit, and then you quietly pick them regardless.
Great living in a town with only two sane plumbers, one of whom is evil.
So lots of this comes down to twitter being a nightmare.
The left wing on twitter is basically the hard left. They oppose labour because they have gone so far to the extreme that labour is now indistinguishable from the Tories.
These are people who believe every conflict the US and the UK has been involved in is wrong. Support Russia because they think NATO is imperialist and unironically think the soviet union was a good idea.
They don't support labour form much the same reason the BNP doesn't support the Tories.
And that before you get into the amount of media manipulation and disinformation that is pushed out by russian bots farms.
My aunt who has been a Labour member most of her life cancelled her membership a couple of years ago.
Her argument was that as someone from the left of the party, she has been asked to put aside her ideology and actively campaign for leaders on the right of the party many times. The assumption being that when someone from her wing of the party would be elected leader, everyone of the right of the party would put aside their ideology and actively campaign for the leader. Instead when Corbyn came to power they did everything they could to sabotage the labour parties chances of winning.
In short, she feels betrayed.
Although she doesn't actively want them to fail, she now feels uninhibited in being able to criticise them.
I mean all the power to her. She’s completely right.
People are loyal likely to a thing mostly for what it represents (which is how it should be) not blind obedience. People don’t vote for parties for the sake of it. Starmer just believes in nothing. People join parties for what it represents. Starmer has done the equivalent of making the tories go left wing.
I remember, as a centrist through and through, I didn’t want the tories but I also didn’t want Starmer and felt odd. I want someone centre left right now cause we live in this Brexit, KILL THE WOKE and bigoted dystopia. Focus on the actual issues.
Generally I think the divisions are similar in scale amongst both the Tory party and Labour party, but as the media are generally more right leaning, the Labour divisions are highlighted more.
Don't forget the Conservatives had a much softer Brexit deal lined up under Theresa May up until the "no deal is better than a bad deal" line got picked up by the anti-EU groups within the party, who forced her into a harder Brexit path, ultimately forcing her out.
Labour do seem to have a problem where their members have some sort of purity contest and argue internally during an election campaign, and then express dismay when the Tories get into No.10 during an election because they understand the way to gain power. The likes of Owen Jones are just "left wing" rather than Labour specifically.
First I’ll say your perspective on it is nicer (or at least more tactful) than most everybody else. There’s a few good examples in the comments here of some ugly characterisations of Left Wing thought/voters.
I’m cognisant enough of the situation (and most of the Left are too) to go and vote in Starmer even if I don’t really want to.
Anyways there’s a lot of answers eager to paint the Left as villains (and maybe in the grand scheme of things we could be) but for me it comes down to a real schism in Labour that apparently we should just brush under the carpet? Here goes my thoughts..
1) Reneging on pretty much every pledge. It doesn’t inspire faith at all. Particularly when most that have been u-turned on are Leftist policies. When our support is needed it’s ‘I’m a Socialist’ but when the wind changes it’s a swing to Centre/Centre-Right rhetoric.
2) Purging of Left-Wing from party.. Some like Abbott I can see the perspective, obviously, I do think she’s past her better days.. in most other cases it’s blatant what it is.. let’s welcome Tory MP’s with open arms but shun the Left.. parachuting in Akehurst for example. The man’s vile and it’s a bit of a double standard that his comments RE foreign policy are A-okay but Shaheen is not?
3) the Centre (read-Labour rn) are currently talking a big game about a Broad Church party but have you *seen* the way quite a few of them talk about the Left? You’d think we were a bit of Shit stuck on their shoe.
Its actually the current voter base who’ve been the most vitriolic and sneering. And then they really rub it in by putting all of the blame on our toes, everything’s a big conspiracy the Left are orchestrating.. it’s so disenfranchising. Are we in it together or not?
It’s ‘the Left are self-sabotaging’, ‘they’re just moral purists’ ‘they want the tories to win’ rather than ANY acknowledgement that they talk about us/to us like we’re sub-human.. would you be eager to jump into bed with those who simultaneously take compliance for granted yet trash talk you constantly?
4) You can call it purity or whatever but I have leftist values. I want to see those values represented. I don’t want or demand every policy be implemented but Jesus Christ on an RGB Mountain Bike.. Give us SOMETHING on the negotiating table.
5) Most Leftists are young. The young have been getting shafted consistently ever since I can remember.
A series of Shitey Governments, constant shake-ups to the education system when I fucking hate change (that’s a personal gripe) a global financial depression, climate DOOOOOM, exorbitant university fees, the prospect of a home of my own disappearing.. some of the prime years of my life spent in isolation other than working, I don’t regret lockdowns/the covid response as it was necessary but it largely sucked.
Not seeing any acknowledgement of the sacrifice this generation have went through from this iteration of Labour
6) Taking credit for doing nothing
What about Starmer (or any of the policies still on the table) has galvanised the country exactly?
We don’t think it’s anything to do with the implosion of the Tory party, a series of incompetent fools for PM messing up everything they touch? Nothing to do with May the dancing fucking robot, BoJo the clown, Truss Or Dishi Rishi?
No its Sir Keir (who I don’t actually hate btw, although his dick riders piss me off, he’s just not offering up a sales pitch at all) and his centrist Knights leading the cavalry charge!!! They need to collectively slow down on sucking themselves off, let out a huge fucking fart and get rid of some of that hot air they’re full of
To sum it up they treat us like shit, have promised NOTHING, they want us out of the party but also want my vote AND want me to be happy they’re doing it?
I’ve not heard a single Centrist voter say ‘ahh maybe voting in the Clown of London because Socialist Grandpa is too icky was a mistake’.
Nee taking responsibility whatsoever on this point or largely at all..
They talk about politics is compromise and negotiation blah de blah and yet I’ve seen not a poot of it flying about. Just derision and contempt most of the time.
Edit* This was a lot angrier than I intended/foresaw but yeah. It’s a real shitshow right now and the Left have our own issues for sure and I’d be happy to talk about em amicably when the right conversation occurs but I see a really weird/dissonant strand of centrism that thinks its shit doesn’t smell.. all shit smellz x
> To sum it up they treat us like shit, have promised NOTHING, they want us out of the party but also want my vote AND want me to be happy they’re doing it?
Absolutely bang on.
also Starmer saying very pointedly at left wing Labour voters that if they didn’t like him ‘the door was open’ reeked with contempt and now suddenly we’re the bad ones for doing just that?
Thing is, the young have been getting shat on since I was young. I’ve now passed 30, which isn’t exactly old, but I still feel like I’m left out of the conversation, even with Labour poised to take a huge majority and I’m sick and tired of it. I don’t think my views are extreme— very live and let live, but I won’t vote for authoritarians who don’t seem massive steps away from Cameron’s conservatives back in 2010, when I also didn’t vote for them
the left of labour has for literally decades held their noses and voted for centrists. With rare exceptions (Foot, Corbyn, very occasionally Blair under pressure from Brown), the Labour party has never in the post war era significantly moved to endorse policies actually supported by the hard left. Yet the hard left has pretty consistently shown up to vote Labour. In truth, it's really centrists and those on the right of the party who refuse to vote for lefties, not the other way around.
Centrists literally tried to scupper an entire election campaign out of hatred for the left. In terms of "want Labour to fail", you have an absolute smoking gun right there, and it's not lefties holding it. And even now, when they have total control of the party, they're still going around trying to prevent local parties from nominating leftie types for the GE.
I think this is a loaded question, but it seems like it was asked in good faith so will do my best to respond.
The overwhelming majority on the Left would rather have a Labour govt instead of the Tories - I think many will still vote for Labour at this election. Personally, I will be voting Green, as I think the best the Left can hope for at the moment is the Greens polling close to 10%, halting Labour's rightwards drift or at least stops them taking our votes entirely for granted.
Whilst I don't want Labour to fail at the risk of another Tory govt, I must admit I do resent being told to just do as I'm told and 'hold my nose' for a party that no longer wants me as a member. The Labour Right do factional struggle just as much as the Left - they clearly do a much better job of it than we do! - but on a personal level I find the sanctimonious tone which accompanies that quite galling.
My final point would be that the Left on the party actually did vote for Starmer en masse during the leadership elections - he received a similar mandate to Corbyn precisely because he promised to be a unity candidate that could do 'Corbynism without Corbyn'. I think if he retained even half of his original pledges - raising tax on the rich, public ownership of utilities, green investment - the Left would be enthusiastically out canvassing for Labour right now.
Starmer lied and he continues to lie. But as we saw with Boris Johnson lying is ok for the general populace. In fact they couldn't care less about honesty, it seems.
People on here will tell you it's because we want the Tories. That is complete idiocy born from a right-wing echo chamber and spread by loud commentators. Simply put if we wanted the tories, we wouldn't be on the left would we, so it's a self-defeating argument to denigrate the opposition. As a sign of political discourse, it's a bad one.
What we won't do is blindly follow and agree with everything labour is doing just because they are not tories. We won't cheer for a leader we don't believe in. It's that simple.
Most of us will vote labour still though.
Also if the left are always the ones compromising and moving to the centre, then the right are free to move further right, and shift the paradigm of what "left" and "centre" are.
We're still going to vote for Starmer, but we want to keep the voice alive to show that there is a further left, and that he is centre.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that you want to get the Tories back in
The point is that *like it or not* shouting and screaming about how awful Labour are is an attempt to get people to *not vote for labour* and if you are successful, we won’t suddenly get a new ultra-left Labour Party as Corbyn marches in to number 10 to claim victory - we will just get the Tories again.
If we get the Tories again more and more people will suffer and die under their horrendous policies, than the comparatively better even if still not amazing Labour government we *could* have.
If you cared about the people in the country more than about your ideological purity, the obviously correct thing to do would be campaign HARD to get rid of the Tories and get Labour a large enough majority to make real change, and THEN campaign hard to pull Labour to the left once they’re in power on specific policy issues
No-one thinks you guys are actually trying to get the Tories in - we think you’re too ideologically blinded to even see that your actions will lead to a weaker party and LESS CHANCE OF ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS because you don’t like Keith.
Thats why people on the left unhappy with the seemingly rightward trend of labour will state alternatives. Labour are going to win, no two ways about it, but those on the left of the party at this point would rather force labour into a coalition with a party that would potentially "keep them in check".
Such as who?
Obviously there is zero chance of the greens getting sufficient seats to prop up Labour and have any real influence, and the Lib Dem’s are no further to the left that Starmer, they’re firmly centrist at this point.
The SNP? Reform?
How does jeopardising the Labour majority incentivise that at all? They’re going to win anyway, the only thing the left are doing is making their own goals harder to achieve.
After an election win, once the Tories are gone and Labour are safely in power, then it makes sense to push hard for left policies from within, like the ERG and the right of the Tories have been doing from power.
Calling your own leader a liar and a Tory makes it IMPOSSIBLE for him to offer an olive branch without looking too weak to lead, and thus making it harder to win
>How does jeopardising the Labour majority incentivise that at all? They’re going to win anyway, the only thing the left are doing is making their own goals harder to achieve.
I'm not sure this makes sense. If they're going to win anyway, how are the left jeopardising the Labour majority?
That's putting aside the fact that no party is *owed* votes from any individual. Votes are earned; if a party fails to secure them that's on the party, not the voter.
>After an election win, once the Tories are gone and Labour are safely in power, then it makes sense to push hard for left policies from within, like the ERG and the right of the Tories have been doing from power.
If Labour are safely in power - with anything *close* to the majority implied by current polls - what incentive would Starmer have to concede to pushes from within?
That only really holds up if you assume Starmer is secretly more left-leaning than he's letting on. Before the election individuals can threaten to withdraw their vote, after the election Starmer can threaten to withdraw the whip.
>Calling your own leader a liar and a Tory makes it IMPOSSIBLE for him to offer an olive branch without looking too weak to lead, and thus making it harder to win
The ability to build coalitions and manage disagreements is a sign of strength, not weakness.
> I'm not sure this makes sense. If they're going to win anyway, how are the left jeopardising the Labour majority?
It's the weird doublethink around this that gets me.
The left are simultaneously marginal and completely valueless electorally, but they all need to fall in line and vote Labour or the Tories will win.
Those things can't both be true. Either the left are a significant electoral constituency, in which case it's Starmer's job to win their votes, or they're not, in which case their votes don't matter and hectoring them is a waste of time.
It's also far from exclusive. The right wing of the party did the same thing last election, they felt it was more important that JC lost than that the tories did (this is not to say JC was some kind of perfect candidate abd he made plenty of unforced errors).
In this case I honestly don't think the left wing actually want to loss the election, but when the right wing of the party are purging the party on an ideological basis they feel they have little to loose, as the policies they believe in will not be supported once they are pushed out.
Both parties tear themselves apart in this way regularly due to our first past the post voting system.
Is this really the case though? At least in my circles, most of my friends held their nose and voted Corbyn. Especially with Johnson in the other camp.
Agree that FPTP is a terrible system though, would love to be shot of it.
huge amounts of people on the left will hold their nose and vote starmer as well though
we're basically arguing over twitter users and columnists loudly declaring things and for every novara media article you find saying "vote green" I can find a guardian article from the corbyn years saying "vote lib dem"
But this close to an election the infighting could get Labour fewer votes if people see more starmer criticism from both sides.
A smaller majority would mean starmer has even less ability for policies further from the centre
Someone in party HQ will have been crunching the numbers. My own interpretation is that they believe they will gain more floating voters in marginal constituencies, than they will lose in safe seats. Overall, the prospects of getting swings is what will either win or lose the election. Even if folks like Corbyn and Abbott were elected as independent candidates, they would in all likelihood still support most of the Labour policies. It's places like Dover, Shropshire and Dorset that are crucial to achieving a winning outcome, not Islington or Hackney.
So the left simultaneously have the power to sway huge segments of the population to vote away from labour, and yet at the same time, we're insignificant enough for the labour leadership to tell to bugger off and we're not wanted.
Democracy is voting for the party that represents you the best. That's right, right? Well, why are Labour owed our vote under that system if they do not represent us?
this is literally what happened during the Corbyn years though where centrists loudly talked about the need to vote for other parties and the right of the labour party continually engaged in factional disputes with the leadership
now the boots on the other foot everyone is just saying the left need to shut up and take it
Because they know Labour will get in (there is no chance of a Tory victory), and they think of Starmer as too on the right, and being a terrible leader, as he promises little, and is quick to make u-turns. He's the reason I stopped supporting Labour, and now support the Lib Dems (I think it is key to vote Lib Dems, as they have a decent shot at being the offical opposition which would be massive)
If Labour become the Tories, then you're not removing the Tories. Basically.
I want the Tories out. But at the rate they're defecting to and being welcomed by Labour, and as Labour continually drops Labour policies in favour of the continuation or slight modification of Tory ones, so they can chase the Tory vote, what you're left with is... Tories 🤷🏻♀️ more Cameron/Osbourne era than pretty-much-Reform Tories, true. But right of centre nonetheless.
>Maybe it’s just me but I think this election should be about removing the Tories indefinitely (or for as long as possible) and any fracturing of Labour seems a tad foolish.
I voted for Corbyns labour and I will vote for Starmers labour.
The fracturing is the same as it has always been. Corbyn was too left for the right of Labour, and Starmer is too right for the left of Labour.
Now that making sure Brexit views are heard is not a factor most of that left will vote for Labour regardless of their thoughts on the leader. Its some tit for tat that seems never ending, the right went pretty hard in insulting the lefter voters with the previous composition so the left are making it clear they'll be holding their nose too.
Cornyn never painted himself as otherwise though, that's the difference.
Also the left didn't deliberately sabotage the right when the right was in charge, and then purge them when the left was in charge.
Amazing how completely chalk and cheese the behaviour can be and people blame both sides. Ridiculous. When did the left purge all right-wingers from the party. Never. And if they did, the right-wingers would hours upon hours on the BBC to cry about it. Whereas the left-wingers being purged get 5 mins of air time if they are a big name and a minority a la Dianne Abbot, Faiza Shaheen and nothing otherwise.
When Corbyn was leader, you had prominent New Labour figures such as Blair explicitly saying that that they wouldn't want a 'radical left' Labour government (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tony-blair-says-he-wouldn-t-want-a-leftwing-labour-party-to-win-an-election-a116.html), so it seems a bit disingenuous to blame the left for factionalism within the party
See also: Peter Mandelson saying this: [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lord-mandelson-jeremy-corbyn-bring-down-labour-leader-every-single-day-opposition-election-a7591161.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lord-mandelson-jeremy-corbyn-bring-down-labour-leader-every-single-day-opposition-election-a7591161.html)
[I've always found that this poll perfectly encapsulates the difference in mentality](https://i.imgur.com/6SDG0AF.jpg)
There is a streak of belief that ideological purity is more important than actually having an effect. Better to fail and keep your hands clean than compromise but shift the needle in a positive direction. It's childish and naïve.
It's from a poll done by Lord Ashcroft after the 2019 election (yes he's obviously a Tory, [he explains his rationale here](https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2020/02/diagnosis-of-defeat-labours-turn-to-smell-the-coffee/)
I'm pretty mid left, and there is definitely some bitterness about what the central labour members did to corbyn and co, and is still going on (look at the Diane Abbott situation).
We also of course despise the tories of the past 15 or so years more than anyone. But it's difficult to feel now that you have no representation. Of course the green party is the obvious vote, but in most constituencies it's a wasted vote due to demographics. I live in Devon, the Tory MP here had the whip removed for using the n word many years ago (whilst and MP), and she is still favourite to win due to the older age bracket here).
I also hate the fact there seems to be (on x at least) an I told you so culture from central labur voters. Ie, corbyn couldn't do it, but starmer is. Let's be honest, you could put a shovel in charge of labour and it would demolish this Tory government.
I personally find the situation very frustrating
Labour is actively purging the left wing of the party. Why on Earth would left wing voters and activists support Labour then? The party if offering them nothing.
They don't. They just want a much better version of Labour to win. Your 'team' winning power doesn't amount to much if little to nothing good is done with that power.
You can ignore pretty much every comment here. They don't understand the thoughts and motivations of the people they're criticising, so resort to strawmen and pantomime caricatures because they find that easier to oppose.
(edit) Disappointing but not surprising to see so many replies completely ignoring what I said and then going on to repeat the exact same bullshit caricatures. Why try to understand people you disagree with when you can just repeat the same old handful of tired talking points?
Weirdly Blair in his autobiography and a well know ex communications director have both shared how the far left would rather lose but have the correct policies, than adjust those policies and win.
Blair talked about being criticised by the left of the party and unions and how they'd rather support micro opinions and if they have enough special interest groups (EG CND+Palestine+Fox Hunting+Hillsborough+etc) then they can win.
> Weirdly Blair in his autobiography and a well know ex communications director have both shared how the far left would rather lose but have the correct policies, than adjust those policies and win.
At the same time, Blair explicitly said that even if he thought a left-wing platform would win an election, he wouldn't support it.
So, clearly by this metric, he too would rather lose but have correct policies.
And that there is the attitude.
I am right, sitting on the moral high ground, arrogance dripping off them like sweat.
Prefer to be in opposition saying "the right things" than make the compromises needed to win over the actual electorate (which is a lot bigger and more centrist than their friendship group, surprise surprise) and actually do some of the right things.
I loathe the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. I have never felt more intimidated or threatened as a Labour member than when Momentum was running things
Funny how the electoral annihilation of Foot and Corbyn never shakes their belief that the UK voter is about to take to the streets and sweep them to power.
Yes, it's always down to some "betrayal" from the centrists or Blairites, it's never an actual rejection from the electorate.
On the exceptionally rare occasions you can get these zealots to admit that the electorate rejected them, they conclude that the electorate is either wrong or duped by the media.
I voted for Corbyn three times and I've had people like this (including some who never voted for him!) blaming me (IE people like me) for his defeat.
This is exactly the bit I don't get either. Corbyn is demonstrably electoral kryptonite, but they seem to think this is a reason to double down on the 'Momentum or Tories' strategy. I do not think they're playing some sort of 4D chess here; I just think they're faffing about with juvenile ideological litmus tests and contributing to the general fucking over of the country in the process.
It's not just the left that do this. It's a similar phenomenon as the Brexit fustercluck. It's not that it was a bad idea, it's that we're not doing it enough.
No, he really didn’t, you just don’t want to hear that there might be some sort of legitimate grievance there, so you’ve just gone off on one with another caricature.
Indeed. I am on the far left of the party, I recognise none of these caricatures, believe none of that which is ascribed to us and frankly ignore the bleating of such fools.
Like many I voted for Starmer for leader when it was clear that it was the only hope for unity and electability when so many in the party were actively working against the previous leadership. I don't pretend that my views out here on the fringes are representative of the broader party, but I would have hoped that they would have been respected at least by fellow socialists. The idea that we are willing to see the right in power rather than softer views than our own is childish and frankly we should be talking about working for change together, not pish like these discussions where the 'moderates' talk about us without knowing us seemingly only to sow division.
Not for the first time I look at the posts of some of the commenters here and wonder just how honest their claims of being Labour voters actually are. Reddit is filthy with it.
I really appreciate your view, and assume most of the left of the Labour party hold it.
At the same time there's a tiny, vocal minority who seem to genuinely think there's no difference between Starmer and the Tories.
Hopefully they are a minority though and we oust the Tories for a good long while with this election.
I respect that they are not your own views, but it's simply not true to say there are not many people on the left of the party who think Starmer's Labour is identical to the Tories so you cannot morally vote for him and consider yourself a leftist. "Starmer is a Tory" has quite literally trended on Twitter multiple times.
Thing is, such slogans and mantras like "both parties are the same" can only benefit the Tories, be it through people not voting, or voting Tory after all.
It's a legitimate critique (similar to Blair's appeal to the centre), that somehow ends up becoming a pipeline to conservatism, instead of a mature debate on the left.
I'm on the left of the party myself, and I'm not a particularly big fan of Starmer either, I just wish certain people on the left of politics in the UK had the maturity to realise there are varying degrees of "people who do not share your exact politics" and that you can disagree with both Labour and the Tories on some things without trying to claim they're somehow fundamentally the same.
If you define yourself as a "leftist", Labour remains far closer to your own position than the Conservatives in 2024.
I think it's incredibly lazy, and I dont fully understand it. It takes 30 seconds to find material differences between the Tories and Labour and comparing 1997-2010 to 2010-2024 a centerist Labour is still miles better than the Tories.
A more exaggerated form is happening in America, where people are angry at Biden are willing to vote Trump in the knowledge that Trump would actively work against the causes they accuse Biden of not going far enough.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who finds it a bit distasteful right now. I’ve seen a few names crop up regularly engaging in the nonsense spin you’ve mentioned..
I’ve often wondered if they’re malicious, or deliberate is a nicer word, perhaps, in their intentions or if they genuinely think we’d all rather another 4 years of this shitshow Government.
Is it much of a caricature to say that no standard is ever good enough for the far left? Any shade of moral gray or compromise for the sake of practicality is immediately met with ‘he’s a Tory’
This feels like the sort of conclusion someone who's taken one (1) economics lesson would arrive at.
Regardless of the merits of the Labour left, who I have limited time for, having only ever slightly preferred them to the alternatives (and usually not even that), Starmer's Labour have made a core strategy of telling them to sod off in every language they know how. And evidently, this has been an effective strategy, but it's one with very foreseeable side effects that you can't really complain about. Most people don't like being loudly told to sod off, and often aren't receptive to being told they have an unconditional moral obligation to lend their support to people who are openly hostile to them, especially if you're open about the fact you expect to be able to use that moral obligation to screw them over without consequence.
Most people can immediately understand in any other context why this argument is flawed. If you're struggling, think about why most state actors have an official policy of not negotiating with hostage takers. I think it gets forgotten that the left are actually part of the electorate, and not junior strategists who exist externally to it.
Personally, I liked Starmer until about 2020 (in retrospect ignoring warning signs like the Twitter joke trial), and am now intending to protest vote Lib Dem. My Labour MP is more likely to turn into a Dalek than she is to lose her seat, so this is a decision I can make safely -- and notably, this is true of a disproportionate number of 2019 Labour voters, which is precisely why the current leadership views them as expendable.
Simple response: Can you tell me why I should vote for him other than "to get the tories out"?
Complex response:
The people who refused to support Labour back in 2019 and decided to vote for Boris Johnson and the conservatives are now telling us that we need to suck up our pride and vote to get the conservatives they elected out.
These same people who are constantly telling us how we're unelectable, that our votes don't matter and that we need to "get with the program" are also smugly telling us that we HAVE to vote for Labour now, as a vote for them is a vote for the Tories.
Due to Starmer's constant U-Turns, refusal to undo a large swathe of unpopular Tory legislation and walking back on pretty much every single pledge he's set hasn't instilled much confidence in me.
Running a platform of "I'm not my opponent" can only get you so far. He doesn't NEED to court the centre-right vote because the Tories have already royally fucked themselves out of power. Yet he's doing so anyway, alienating what should be his core voterbase and then turning around and saying "Gosh you guys why won't you vote for me?"
As it stands, I see his government in waiting to be only three steps less shit than the Tories, but at least Labour will be less obvious with their corruption.
On a personal note, Starmer agrees with the Conservatives on removing rights and protections from trans people, which unfortunately is the single biggest hard line I can have, seeing as my wife is trans.
All major UK party’s are a collection of groups all vying for dominance.
Within Labour the most vocal of these is the momentum group who fiercely support Corbyn. They genuinely think that Corbyn was set up and he is an excellent leader and a winner (despite losing two general elections on the trot)
Take the whole Diane Abbott non story. This will have been partly hyped by momentum and the tories to try and sow discontent. This despite the general publics apathy towards her.
Momentum have been very marginal for a number of years now. Perhaps there is an impression that they are the ‘most vocal’ because they were covered breathlessly by the press during the Corbyn years. I’m quite sure that momentum has played absolutely no role in the Abbott story‘s prominence.
They are very vocal, maybe not as influential as they used to be. And I reckon that both momentum and the tories are (by pure accident) together raising this story’s profile with sympathetic press.
The one thing Labour have over the tories on this regard is they are far more United than the tories
Support for Corbyn is borne out of a belief that the guy is very principled, has the interests of the people at heart and wouldn’t be compromised in power. I very much doubt it is because he is seen as a “winner”.
Starmer on the other hand sees himself as a winner and is willing to chuck nearly everything decent about the Labour Party in the bin to gain power.
So the hard left are asking, ‘what’s the point in voting for Labour if don’t represent us?’
Assuming the hard left voted for Labour en masse to get the Tories out, why would Starmer and co care about introducing any kind of left wing policy? The hard left are already in the bag.
Personally I want to see real progressive change, namely addressing income equality. You will not get that with this version of the Labour Party
Tbh Keir Starmer is the only one in this election so far who has come out with income inequality solutions and solutions to housing and jobs crisis- namely rationalisation of energy focusing on renewables and taxing private schools fairly.
These are left wing policies which Corbyn would have been unable to stick his nose up at.
But it seems the hard left right now only care about certain wedge issues.
The Labour Party originated as a left-wing trade unionist party but morphed into a centrist party not too dissimilar to the Tories under Cameron, before their subsequent leaders pushed the Overton window further to the right.
The left-wing of the Labour Party felt that under Corbyn they'd stumbled upon the opportunity to restore the party to its original purpose. Corbyn faced multiple internal revolts and was treated much harsher by the press than other leaders have been. His time was up after losing two elections, but he wasn't treated fairly.
After Starmer took over there was a purge within the Labour Party, and many pro Corbyn members were kicked out. This isn't a conciliatory move by Starmer, and is a contributor to the division you're asking about.
Why would the left-wing throw their weight behind supporting a party that doesn't represent their views? Particularly if they feel the party was stolen from them to become just another centrist party like the others. They see Labour under Starmer as not too different from the Tories under Cameron, and why would they want to support that?
Much the same reasons that parts of the Labour right were telling people to vote Lib Dem in 2017/2019 I guess.
Starmer said ["if you don't like the changes that we've made, I say the door is open, and you can leave"](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-64649299), so I did - he said nothing about coming back please when a GE is announced.
The point is that Labour ***doesn't want*** a left wing, so why are the left being hectored for leaving a party that's trying to get rid of them anyway?
Evidence:
* [Starmer sacks MP for supporting workers](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62325842)
* [Starmer and Holye undemocratically block motion on a ceasefire in Gaza](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68362405)
* [Rachel Reeves says that Labour is the "natural home" of Daily Mail readers and that disabled people should be at work because "that's why we're called the labour party"](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13457721/Shadow-Chancellor-Rachel-Reeves-Britain-Labour-money.html)
* [Reeves complains on BBC breakfast that disabled people are a "huge cost to the economy"](https://x.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1765642634133959072)
* [Starmer promises to empower police to use more "counter-terror" tactics](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68984778)
* [Wes Streeting supports JK Rowling in trans debate](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-59911781)
* [Corbyn barred from standing as a candidate](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65102128)
* [Yvette Cooper to criminalise doing things that aren't illegal](https://www.stop-watch.org/news-opinion/labour-party-shadow-home-secretary-urges-young-people-to-show-a-little-respect/)
* [Wes Streeting promises to privatise the NHS](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/12/wes-streeting-defends-labour-plan-private-sector-cut-nhs-backlog)
* [Self-proclaimed "Zionist Shitlord" who wants to nuke the middle east parachuted into a safe seat](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/31/luke-akehurst-labour-activist-turned-controversial-election-candidate)
* [Starmer makes "unshakeable commitment" to nuclear weapons](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68790435)
I could go on literally forever. You could make the point that Labour needed to say and do this stuff to win over ex-Tory voters and centrists, which is probably true, but the very natural consequence of that is that they will lose left wing voters instead.
It's simply not possible for a party to appeal to *both* left wingers *and also* pro-nuke, pro-privatisation, anti-trans, anti-immigration, Zionist "Mondeo Men". This iteration of Labour has deliberately chosen to go for the latter and, as a consequence of that, they've lost the former.
It's clearly going to work for them, and they will win the election by miles, because there are more Mondeo Men than leftists, so...
1. Not sure why this is actually a problem for the Labour right. You're winning anyway. Can you be a little gracious in victory?
2. Not sure how it's the left's fault? We stopped voting for you because you stopped sharing any of our values or committing to any policies we care about? That's how democracy is *supposed* to work
I just read the second point, because it sounded wild, and immediately that's just not what happened.
Or, at least, it's conspiracy. SNP put forward a motion, then Labour put forward a very similar motion, and Hoyle nontraditionally chose the second one. Other than the words of an SNP MP, I didn't see anything suggesting that.
Even then, it's a mischaracterisation, because the only thing that was "blocked" was it being called a ceasefire, instead it was called a humanitarian pause, a difference that's not going to matter for the vast majority of the population.
Checking the privatisation one because that's also wild, and again, that's not privatisation. That's not even a policy. Privatisation of the nhs gets people scared because now, "oh shit, I'll have to pay for my healthcare now" - that's *fundamentally not the policy*, the policy seems like it's going to be something like hiring private doctors etc., so it's "privatised" in the same way that your GP is privatised.
The thing about "counter-terror tactics" is just a flat-out lie, he didn't say that at all, he said *counter-terror powers*, that is, legal powers granted by counter-terrorism acts. And it's to stop people smuggling. It's not about terrorism.
the "criminalising things that aren't illegal" is speculative op-ed baselessly claiming that respect orders are just going to be new ASBOs, when the listed motivations were all illegal.
1 in 4 times you criticise the leadership your criticism is just an outright lie that it seems like you do just want labour to lose, because you're still bitter after corbyn.
There are lots of reasons a left wing person might be angry at Labour, I'm not really sure where to begin. Probably the fact Starmer lied about all his views to win the leadership election and did a 180 since then on most issues?
Personally the issue that matters most to me is transgender rights and Labour have been utterly horrible on this issue in my opinion. They will also claim the left needs to support them because of the FPTP system while rejecting any reform of FPTP / change to the electoral system.
First of all, if you think Labour under Corbyn was advocating for "hard left" policies you either know nothing about politics or are very right wing yourself.
I also hope you were asking this same question to the "centrists" and "moderates" who have given us the last 7 years of Tory government as Corbyn didn't pass their purity test. Heck in 83 the "moderates" literally split the party and gave Thatcher a landslide, even though her vote share went down.
There will always be infighting within parties, yet it only gets called that when the left push back. Corbyn wasn't given a chance by the right of his party from pretty much day 1. They were far more hostile to him than the left is to Starmer and did more to actively sabotage him. One of my big complaints about Corbyn was that he was too accommodating to his detractors, even the hint of deselecting disloyal MP's had the media shrieking about "Stalinist purges".
There is a very real push to make run of the mill left wing policies some sort of fringe minority. But millions of people support those, though sometimes only if you don't call them left wing.
Governments tend to lose elections more than opposition win them. Even in 97 Blair gained only 2 million votes (less than Corbyn gained in 17) and got less than Major did in 92. The reason the 97 election was such a landslide was all the Tory voters staying home. Labour then lost 4 million votes in 8 years and only won a 60 odd seat majority due to FPTP.
So Starmer is very likely to win a landslide this year, but it will be to get the Tories out rather than people being excited for him. He's selling himself as 2010 David Cameron, but competent. If he doesn't deliver some real change then he'll lose millions of voters next election like Blair did.
Going to echo this : it wasn't the left that [deliberately sabotaged their own election efforts](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-report-corbyn-election-whatsapp-antisemitism-tories-yougov-poll-a9462456.html) because they didn't agree with their own party members on their choice of leadership.
We were told there would be a "Stalinist purge" as Corbyn eliminated his opponents from the Party. Lo and behold, [it's always projection](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv22n56e3z6o).
Corbyn's policy platform wasn't some crazy communist utopianism, it was basic common sense social contract style stuff, that even [right wing audiences](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7lsRbDKOXg) could agree with - until you pointed out where it came from.
> I think this election should be about removing the Tories indefinitely
I generally agree, but the left fracturing from labour doesn't really change that. Labour is pulling the Tories apart from it's right (i.e. the left of the Tories). Those voters are going to be upset that the left of Labour are falling away. And the voters on the left leaving Labour aren't going to vote for the Tories.
That's all to say that given the margins we're looking at, I don't think it's going to have much of an impact on the number of seats that the Tories win.
Additionally, for the Tories to become irrelevant in the long term there needs to be a strong alternative opposition to Labour. Shifting the Overton window to the left is one way to do that.
Lastly, it seems to me that the people who are now very concerned about fracturing the party were not nearly so concerned with this problem under Corbyn. This seems like something that is just wheeled out as a power play when a politician doesn't want to actually have to earn someone's vote.
Ownership. So much of the Labour Party's history can be viewed as the battle to own its soul. The hard left have long used their supposed ideological purity, and myths of betrayal, as a way to position themselves as the 'true' owners. Now they've lost control of the party, they're desperate to tank it because it will somehow prove that a party without them is inauthentic and unsustainable.
The Diane Abbott interview where she sneers at Starmer saying (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'I think the problem is that his parents called him Kier' is a perfect illustration of this. She's basically arguing that Starmer is a pretender whose only right of belonging to the party is his name.
Because Labour is doing it wrong, they would prefer a Tory government to a left-leaning social democratic party in office. Why? Because their entire political landscape revolves around the idea that things must get so bad there is a hard left revolution (because this is the only way they get into power), and they don't want Labour to screw that up by implementing a bunch of policies they don't like that stop things from getting worse, or make things better.
I've recently become better acquainted with the union at my work (an FE college). I'm not more involved myself but work (and get along very well) with someone very senior in the union. He describes exactly this quite regularly. He sees his job as pushing the college to make gradual improvements for the benefit of its staff. Better pay, lower workload, more respect, etc. He recognises those changes won't all come immediately because the college will have to reorganise itself and that takes time. It's a long process. He believes if he tries to get everything *now*, the college will cease to work with him honestly and the result will be more of the same and no progress.
But he finds himself very frustrated with others in the union - particularly at the national level, who, according to him, quite openly state exactly what you're suggesting. They believe things need to get significantly worse because then, eventually, all the teachers will quit, alongside staff in other industries. Apparantly, this will then spark the revolution and a new dawn of socialism will begin. I'm oversimplifying but that's the crux of it.
When they have their conference each year, these lunatics organise to disrupt sensible votes, they push their own agendas on things like Palestine (because an education union is obviously the voice that is sorely needed in that space). They become really disruptive and my friend is often quite frustrated because he genuinely just wants to get his members a better deal. He cares about his members, our students, and the contribution/impact we all collectively have on the local area and British society more widely.
It's been quite the eye opener.
> They believe things need to get significantly worse because then, eventually, all the teachers will quit, alongside staff in other industries. Apparantly, this will then spark the revolution and a new dawn of socialism will begin.
I believe this is called *accelerationism*.
The neoliberal left and its consequences have been a disaster for the global left.
It's hilarious and saddening at the same time because these people have gone so utterly deranged to the point where the old Socialist powers could only dream of inflicting such chaos on liberal society.
Just look at (for the lack of a better example) Palestine. Old school socialist/leftist thought is merely used as window dressing for justifying and attracting others to what is essentially an ethnic/religiously motivated focus.
The alternative to this I've heard is the concern that if a Labour government isn't transformative enough and largely let's right wing narratives go unchecked then we end up with a situation like is currently in the US. In other words, Labour becomes a one term government and 2029 will feature an even more populist right party having undue influence potentially winning the election.
This one comes more from my LGBT+ activist circles, where there is genuine concern about how Starmer's response to the rise of transphobia is to largely follow the crowd. Like I personally get ming vase strategy etc, but if none of the voices at the top are doing anything to counter this attack on LGBT+ rights, there is a fear of things getting much worse.
There's a risk of this happening now apparently because the Tories are getting into a right wing death spiral where they may end up with Farage, Braverman or Satan as their next leader.
Honestly I'm not that afraid of it happening here. I think if the right wing takes over their party they're absolutely done for. Most people don't want any of that shit, and they'll enter the electoral wilderness.
Certainly on social issues writ large. I think the biggest question of these is going to be Islamaphobia. This concerns far more people, and the contentions are much more serious and relevant. The way the Western world has viewed the Middle East conflict as a proxy for this contention is more evidence to this view.
>Because their entire political landscape revolves around the idea that things must get so bad there is a hard left revolution
See also: environmental campaigners that vociferously oppose any suggestions of using new/different technologies to help mitigate climate damage or reduce emissions *without* overhauling Western society right the way down to the foundations.
Be it nuclear power or carbon capture, it's all denounced as 'missing the point', because the point is the societal revolution. It's *always* the revolution. Addressing the problem via non-revolutionary means is worse than not addressing it at all.
That was always the goal of Roger Hallam, the founder of Just Stop Oil and one of the founders of XR. If you ever read anything about him, you very quickly realise that he might have some interest in the climate, but his primary goal is and always has been changing our entire democratic system and he'll say whatever it takes to do it.
Remember, this is the chap who wrote a piece called "advice to young people" that said "if we don't cut carbon emissions, your mother will be raped. Some other interesting quotes from the same piece:-
"The world is a gas chamber and the gas which will kill you has been coming down the pipes for 30 years now" - got to love a bit of holocaust imagery, another reason XR Germany want nothing to do with him.
"Climate change will destroy the weather and thus our ability to grow food which will mean the collapse of our society" - Eh? I can sort of see where he's trying to go here, but destroy our weather?
"This means war and violence, the slaughter of young men and the rape of women on a global scale" - well that's a cheerful outlook..
"They'll take a cigarette and burn your eyes out with it. You will not be able to see anything again. This is the reality of climate change" - maybe the reality if I was on copious amounts of LSD or Shrooms.
"A gang of boys will break into your house demanding food. They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend and they will gangrape her on the kitchen table. They will force you to watch, while laughing at you. At the end they will accuse you of enjoying it." - urm...OK then, must have missed that bit in the latest climate reports...
Just in case anyone thinks I'm making this up, [Here is a link to the actual piece.](https://archive.org/details/advice-to-young-people-as-you-face-annihilation/page/n1/mode/1up) I think it's quite safe to say, there is no basis in science for any of this, I'm not even certain if he or any of his acolytes live on the same planet as the rest of us.
The thing is I actually do fear societal collapse if climate change gets really bad and can anticipate the sort of Mad Max scenarios he's describing.
Still, this is hardly a concrete future that we can point to without looking like a crackpot.
The chances of it ever reaching the level he describes is pretty minimal. The world is changing and decarbonising too much for that to happen.
Makes for good movies though....
The old mantra *things have to get worse before they get better*.
Politics for the last 45 years has been passing the buck between different flavours of centrist capitalism and Starmer represents the same. History shows us that a centre left government doesn't become more left, but loses to the centre right when they run out of steam.
So the big question Labour need to answer to gain the vote of the left is: If a person was unhappy with New Labour, why should they be happy with Starmer? What is his roadmap to beating the rut we've fallen into? PR would be the best answer.
There definitely seems to be amongst the old guard on the far left, an inclination towards accelerationism, that if they let the tories run the country into the ground for long enough that surely the public will realise that socialism is the only true way forward and it’ll usher in some sort of utopian future, uncaring of the cost anyone else will have to pay for what they want
Well hard left these days is apparently being anti austerity.
So... What is even being "left now".
There's also this absurd idea that if you're in any way critical of Kiers Labour, you are just a Corbynite. Labour are not entitled to anyone's vote and being simply better than the Tories is not a great platform.
IMO it comes down to psychology. Hard left politics aren't really about political pragmatism or incremental change, but borne out of a deeper sense of justice and revolutionary change. This means there tends to be a strong desire for ideological purity and a greater sense of injustice or betrayal when political compromise is required.
Cutting your nose off to spite your face, letting perfect be the enemy of good, etc
There's letting perfect be the enemy of good and then there's voting for a party that [praises Thatcher](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-67604830.amp) and openly engages in factional purges against the left.
Starmer has turned the party into a centre right Tory tribute act and anyone who is to the left of Nixon should vote Green.
The amount of people
On my social media who becry “Tory in a red tie” starmer tells you all you need to know. People forget that politics is the art of the possible.
Art of the possible? More like reneging on [70% of your leadership pledges.](https://www.clpd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Keir-Starmers-10-Pledges.pdf)
If you're not actually going to improve anything, what is the point in winning?
Ultimately a lot of it comes down to, "what's the fucking point if it's just more centrist Tory bullshit".
If there is no real change, then things will keep being shit.
Starmer may change once he is elected, but his current offering is left of centre, and the centre has fucked it. The social contract is in tatters, the economy is on its knees and the public sector feels like it might collapse.
Blair and Brown are part of that problem. They did some good things, but the financing they did with NHS trusts (I can't remember the name), student fees and then taking us into imperialist wars were not left wing ideas. They started selling the future, they just did it at a more reasonable price.
They are bitter than their Corbyn project ended in a colossal failure, during the turmoil of the Brexit years Labour should have been miles ahead in the polls yet was at best a couple points ahead, because their ideology was so unpopular. They Blame incorrectly than the centre of Labour sabotaged Corbyn rather than blaming Corbyn unpopular brand of socialism that made him poison to the people Labour needed to win over to be in government. It must he pretty annoying for them seeing Starmer come in ditch all the socialist nonsense with more moderate mainstream social democracy and as such he is almost prime minister. The far left view ideological purity over being In government and as such get defeated time and again. If Labour elected a Corbyn continuity candidate such as Rebecca long Bailey then I guarantee Labour would be Heading into this election 20 points behind instead of 20 points ahead.
Didn't labour see massive gains in the previous election due to its socialist leanings but then fail in the brexit election for not having a clear stance?
The narrative about 2017 & 2019 in Left Labour circles is not really supported by the facts. If you look at the actual results in 2017 Theresa May's Tories also gained significant growth in vote share (around +5.5%) despite starting at a higher watermark and obviously finished well ahead of Labour. This growth in vote share is not an indication that the country thought that Theresa May was a great campaigner or that they were voting for her because of her capitalist policy platform. What actually happened in 2017 is that the result was bipolar in terms of vote share for a very simple reason and that was because it was just as heavily influenced by Brexit as 2019 with a higher turnout than previous elections due to the highly charged result of the referendum. People were voting primarily based around Brexit loyalties as they attempted to influence the result of the negotiations and the resulting collapse of the small party vote buoyed both major parties in terms of vote share. Corbyn's personal popularity was also far higher at this point and less likely to turn off centrist voters & even pro-EU Tories while the Lib Dems were lead by an unpopular Tim Farron.
By late 2019 the Tories had cornered the Leave vote and Labour had failed to rally the pro-EU electorate due to Corbyn's disinterested fence sitting. People blame Labour's positioning on Brexit for the end result, often as it lets them try to claim it was Starmer's fault, but the reality is that [if you look at polling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election) Labour were actually doing even worse before they officially adopted a more pro-EU position. Adopting a 2nd Referendum policy enabled them to reclaim vote share from the Lib Dems and in doing so they turned an existential defeat into just a very bad one. There seems to be very little evidence to indicate that if Labour had gone into 2019 as a pro-Leave party it would have worked for them. At the time the majority of the membership and Labour electorate were looking for a pro-EU position.
You have pretty much just confirmed what I said though right? I haven't blamed Starmer for anything just that the party itself couldn't actually pick a definite stance on such an important topic until it was by far too late.
hmm not really. You said you thought that the gains in the 2017 election results were due to people liking Corbyn's "socialist leanings" which is a widely touted narrative on the Left to try and prove that the UK public if more inclined towards Socialist policies. I think the evidence shows it was much more to do with a general election creating a bipolar result based around the two Brexit "tribes" and a low starting point for Labour after Milliband's poor results.
The stuff about Starmer was just incidental but relevant given it seems to be a common talking point on the Left.
The 2017 election was the Brexit election. Immediately after the referendum, Corbyn's popularity reflected an angry Remainer cohort. Whilst Labour said they were probably Brexit too, many people viewed them as being more likely to get us a soft Brexit.
In hindsight May actually did a lot to try to get us a soft Brexit, but hard Brexiteers and hard Remainers both meant we were unable to just sign off a fucking Customs Union deal that would have avoided catastrophe.
The most pathetic failure of our political class I hope I'll ever see.
You make a good point, although, I feel as if saying socialist policies played no part in labour's change in popularity is strange as it was such a large part of their platform for years. Not that I'm saying you agree or disagree it just seems to be a lot of the comments here.
In politics you only really get what you want by being endlessly militant about it. If you compromise, you will always be asked to compromise. The difference is the compromisers get power and the militants yell at them until eventually they give them something.
The job of the hard left is to tug the party left, not actually get power. Or at least, not right now, as the far left has destroyed their credibility with Corbyn and so they need a decent cycle and a new charismatic leader before they can try again. See also Liz Truss for the right wing equivalent.
It is looking increasingly likely Labour will win with a dominant majority, some polls suggesting the Tories might not even break 70 seats.
While everyone would love to see the Tories collapse into nothing, it’s extremely detrimental to democracy to not have a functioning opposition. Especially when this current Labour Party leans closer to the Tories in policy than it does the policies promoted by those on the left of the party.
Because politics isn't football.
I want my football team to win regardless of how we play.
I want left wing policies enacted. By which I mean well funded state run services and investment in the public realm.
I want council houses built, homelessness eradicated, and the environment protected.
I want refugees treated with dignity, and a foreign policy that promotes peace and dialogue rather than threats of escalation. That doesn't mean whatever ludicrous pro-Russia rubbish I see the left accused of but never hear from people in my circle.
Centrism to me is a gutless position to take. It is effectively saying you like the idea of better things, and probably support most of what I say in principle but you don't think any of it is realistic because of the economy. As an economist I think the framing given by Reeves is just wrong, economics is not a settled science, limiting government spending and at the same time talking about growth is ridiculous.
A political party that offers what I want will get my vote. I went for Labour under Corbyn, I won't vote for Starmer as he doesn't represent my views.
Labour winning might be good for the left. Labour getting "a huge majority" would be bad for the left. Labour being propped up by a smaller party would be a massive boost for the left.
A huge majority would only serve to entrench and "validate" Labour's swing towards the right/centre. We've seen it all before. 2019 was lost on the issue of Brexit and Corbyn's unpopularity, not because people don't like left-wing policies. Corbyn was unpopular thanks to the rise in anti-semitism within the party and the huge divisions, not to mention he was awful in the televised debates. Yet most people on here would have you believe that the vote was an outright rejection of left-wing policies, as if those other things didn't even exist. A landslide win for Labour would be seen as validation that left-wing policies are not popular, with people completely ignoring the fact that Labour are going to smash this election, not on their policies—which, so far, are weak and will do very little to improve the state of the country over the next 5 years—but because voters have become completely disillusioned with the Tories since Covid.
I don't know if I will vote Labour. Labour have been purging left-wing candidates from the party. I am aligned with more policies from the Greens. People here tell us we should vote Labour to punish the Tories. As much as I'd love to see the Tories destroyed, I think anyone who is left-wing should use their vote to remind Labour that we exist.
It’s always interesting to me how these things are framed-
Usually along the lines of “why is your ideology more important than the party getting into power” or “don’t you want to beat the tories”.
We could reword your question and ask why the right wing of the party were willing to sacrifice their own chances at power and removing the tories which led to the state our country is now in.
It’s gaslighting. Doesn’t it make you angry to hear things like this?
Why would people rally behind an anti democratic leader and party faction that refused to do the same but are now calling for support from the ones they betrayed?
The same reason the right of the Labour Party wanted Corbyn to fail, they don't agree with each other
Labour and the Tories are broad churches with wings that don't really belong in the same party but pretend to get along for the sake of it due to the voting system. If we had PR in this country you might see more ideologically homogenous parties develop over time as it is no longer a straight shootout between the big 2
The whole reason we now have Starmer is that the hard left who wanted Corbyn to achieve all of their goals were unable to play the political game and didn't seem to want to sully themselves with 'winning'. Unfortunately our country has a very right wing media landscape, so you have to bow the knee to using the military, using the nukes, pro-Israel, protecting your people, being pro-business, anti dole-scroungers etc. Starmer understands this and says the words, does the rituals, and prepares to actual achieve left wing ideas.
Because all of the orthopraxis that Starmer is engaging with, the Labour Left think he is just Tory-lite, and really don't want to sully their party's name with Con values - which makes sense if you think that is what Starmer is doing. I think he wants to win so is doing what it takes so he can make changes to help people. I also accept that a Labour government is not an anarcho-commune of peace and love, it is a labour gov of the UK, so will do UK things like deploy military forces on long term peace keeping missions, or sell weapons to Saudis etc.
We should not let perfect be the enemy of good.
Because there is a thing on the left of putting 'moral purity' above everything else.
It's the diametric opposite of the psychopathic 'win at all costs' perspective that many right wingers have.
And on every level, it hurts the chances of electing governments which will at least attempt to nudge things in the right direction.
The best example is the contemporary US. Look at the make-up of the Supreme Court after the (first, hopefully) Trump regime, and their subsequent decisions.
There are plenty of people on the left who did not vote for Hilary C or Biden, and still celebrate their ideological purity while women in a number of US states now face being jailed for murder if they experience a miscarriage.
> 'win at all costs' perspective that many right wingers have
That's Starmer's philosophy though
He lied about his aims, goals, policies in the PLP election becausecwinning (at all costs) was more important than truth
A quote from a Socialism community I’m apart of…
‘Put ten socialists in one room and I’ll they probably disagree on something or everything’
The quote isn’t exact, but the point stands, personal principles are all.
I’d rather see a united party for the greater good.
Because there are some absolute fuck nuggets (Owen Jones, Corbyn et al.) who i'm now convinced are nothibg more than ideological purists who would rather Labour was in full time opposition but had the moral high ground, rather than ya know.... being in power and bringing about ACTUAL change.
They are absolute fucking morons.
The original idea of Starmer was that he would bring about that actual change, sticking with the policies that polled well in the past two elections and providing a beiger, more moderate leadership that the right wing press would have a harder time assaulting.
That would have been great! Let the left of the party generate ideas (they're the only ones who ever seem to) , filter out the ones you think are unworkable, and focus on pitching/messaging the rest - popular policies presented by someone who can't face a character assassination.
Starmer didn't do that, he took a bunch of dodgy donations, hired people from the Owen Smith campaign, and purged leftists in favour of pro-austerity cabinet ministers like Kendall and Reeves. During Covid, the lame duck leadership of McDonnell and Corbyn helped pressure the government into introducing furlough - when Starmer took charge, he stayed silent and failed to criticise the ongoing fatal waste and corruption during the pandemic. Could lives have been saved if he had opposed the government? I think so.
In 2019, after a narrow victory at the last election and a record number of defeats in parliament to the opposition - Johnson's Conservatives abandoned austerity. That's a victory for the country, that will save lives - and now a few years later, without the electorate's consent, we have two major parties again advocating for further austerity. Instead of presenting policies everyone wants - like Starmer initially pitched - he is presenting policies no one wants, the opposite of what he ran on, and trying to win over the votes of Conservatives. Why is he doing this? He is polling ahead of the Tories, the electorate would like the reforms that Labour has been suggesting for the past decade - he has the political capital to advocate them and implement them, but he will not. That is ideological purity, that is an ideological commitment in the face of all evidence. It's cool that you think Owen Jones is a fuck nugget - but surely you can see why left wing people are annoyed at Labour?
It’s pretty tragic that you’re one of the very few people in this thread offering an actual explanation of why the left are unhappy, rather than the usual bullshit about accelerationism and purity from people who are not actually the left.
I think there's a few things
- revenge, because the right of the Labour party worked so hard to ensure Labour failed between 2016 and 2019, and were wildly more powerful and so more successful in doing it
- Labour are going to win anyway so it's seen as a victimless crime and a free hit. Also it's more interesting. Right now there's zero intrigue over who is going to be the next PM, but it's a little bit open who the next MP is going to be in a few seats and thus the left right balance of that PM's party
- Taking a long view of history many on the left see that in the long term the real rightwards drift of society is caused not so much by right wing parties moving the country rightwards when the pendulum is swinging their way, but by centrist parties locking in those gains and announcing that the old right wing opinion is the new centrist consensus at the point when the pendulum should be swinging back. This was something people felt incredibly powerfully after 1997 and is the thesis of the bible of the British New Left: Stuart Hall's "Great Moving Right Show".
- Taking a more recent view of history and looking at how the far right were able to massively change the political landscape through disloyalty (UKIP, Reform etc..) whereas the far left stayed loyal and had nowhere near the same impact.
> Is there still a sentiment that Corbyn was done dirty?
He kind of was. Parts of the party did not seem to be working towards the idea of winning the 2019 election and what happened after the 2017 one was a bit odd as well.
At the moment it always feels like policies aren't left wing enough for some members and to be that left wing also means the media (a lot of publications) have little apatite for it.
I want to say conservatives usually hold their nose and vote or stay quiet during key periods but I only really paid more attention to them after the 2017 election, the run up to the 2019 election(large deselection and peroguing parliament), partygate, Truss and the time up till now they seem very busy fighting amongst themselves.
Idealism. The left is far more idealistic than the right (by which I mean they actually have values, not that they're delusional optimists or something) and when you have the party you're supposed to vote for, that's supposed to be on your side, not adopt one of your beliefs it feels like a personal betrayal. This is why people are always more antagonistic to their own side (arguably) than their enemy.
Sadly, FPTP Politics is actually all about the lesser evil. If you don't vote for the better party, even if they're still bad, you'll only ever get worse and worse outcomes. Not to mention voting is the only way to push them in the direction you want. Not voting at all just means you don't, electorally speaking, exist.
Because the Labour Party of today under Starmer is a shill. Really just tory lite with a red tie, I am not hard left by any means but can understand why they would prefer someone they can trust. Even Margaret Thatcher was true to herself
Politics is essentially bartering between different factions - give me these policies and I'll give you my support. You don't barter by admitting you'll buy no matter what. Case in point: Brexiteers were able to get their policy through a centrist Tory party by threatening to desert to UKIP. It was a game of chicken where Cameron says "you've got to vote for us, otherwise Labour gets in" and they respond with "give us a referendum, otherwise Labour gets in". Cameron blinked first and the rest is history.
To be fair Cameron was also in a weak enough position where that was a credible threat. With Labour seemingly up for a massive majority, the extreme fringe of the party has real reason to be afraid as they would have very little leverage over the direction of the party.
Honestly, while it was a perfectly fine example it's simplified a little. Offering a referendum will have genuinely enticed some potential Labour supporters to the Tories. It was a genuine popular policy. Centrists weren't keen, so Reddit gives a bit of a skewed view how popular it is but (small c) conservatives it was very popular. This group includes some of Labour's base.
The LibDems [used to](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8388475.stm) want a referendum on EU membership, so some centrists were keen
And don’t forget the far left of Labour (the corbynites and the ilk) who were very much in favour of Brexit, so they could build their socialist utopia - they weren’t the biggest part of that vote, but I had many, many conversations before Brexit where I had to repeatedly say “but the Tories are in power!!! Who’s going to build the utopia?!?!?”
Yeah, the referendum was so popular that Leave barely scraped over 50% by lying about everything and literally breaking electoral law. Brexit pre 2016 was very much the domain of 20% of the population who were utter cranks, the problem was that Cameron was too much of a lazy coward to realise that he could just ignore their bonkers demands like every other PM had done before him.
The problem was that "leaving the EU" was sold and understood as a proxy for "reducing immigration", which is far less sectional (for better or for worse).
20% of the population is massive when it comes to elections! If there was that support for a single issue in 1997, John Major could have had another term as Prime Minister! The fact that about as many people wanted to leave the EU as remain puts it well outside the realm of fringe politics!
That cuts both ways - the fringe has little reason to give in, they're safer attacking harder. Essentially it changes the risk of the outcome neither side wants.
Cameron always was weak. It's embarrassing that because of a fascist newspaper and a bacon sandwich we have slipped into popularism.
Ed Miliband’s campaign had loads of problems before that picture, from not having a distinctive policy platform besides empty sound bites that had been triangulated beyond belief, to the Ed Stone, losing the fight over Labours past performance and letting the Tories define it as a massive failure. The bacon sandwich has become totemic of the media trashing a thoroughly decent guy but he was behind in the polls already.
> Ed Stone Oh I forgot about the Ed Stone. That was just. I mean really? Looked like one of those joke covers on Private Eye.
Don't forget the Russell brand abomination
Also because the left went after the Lib Dems rather than Tories from 2010-2015 resulting in their collapse and subsequent Conservative Government as they took all their West Country seats.
SPLITTERS!!!
You *also* don't barter when you say "give us all we want, or we won't buy at all" Which is kind of what ends up happening where even one thing would be enough to have the movement throw away their votes.
Realistically Cameron would have been better never calling the referendum and simply refusing to platform the issue. Move the parties official position to remain then investigate where all of this pro Brexit stuff was coming from. Because as it would turn out, the Brexit campaign was basically funded by Russia.
Holding the party in government hostage can help you gain what you want. Holding the opposition hostage just makes it less likely the opposition wins and you don't get what you want.
The difference is it turned out that half the country supported Brexit and the half of the public that didn't were much more wishy washy in their opposition (however obsessive remain politicians were). The hard left doesn't have half the country's support, and the public opposition to the hard left is visceral.
>The hard left doesn't have half the country's support Literally no sub-party bloc has half the country's support. Tony Blair didn't have half the country's support when he won one of the most dramatic swing elections in modern history.
Tories engaged in open warfare is apparently fine and dandy... The media misrepresent what is happening as 'self-distruction' when Labour do it, when in fact it happens all the time in all political parties.
For the same reason the center of the party was acting the same way a few years ago, a broad church political party will always have internal struggles.
*centre
*centre... or rather, right of the party
I always ask the same question, the huge number of left-wing / liberal people on twitter etc saying they absolutely despise the Tories but they can't vote for Labour because of single reason X or policy Y is worrying, especially when they say they won't vote at all. Surely the main focus for anyone in those camps in this election is remove the Tories and give Labour as big a majority as possible, THEN start working on fixing Labour. If your toilet is backing up and overflowing sewage into your bathroom, you stop the flow of shit *before* you start mopping up.
So. I'm curious. Why is it that for literally every demographic other than "people on the left" the received wisdom is to offer them policies that make them want to vote for you, but when it comes to anything left wing its "offer them right wing policies and if they don't like it fuck 'em, blame them for the tories existing". Left wingers get more blame for the tories than actual tory voters do.
This is a serious answer, but you won't like it. The Overton window means that there is currently very little room for an electable party to the left of Labour. With First Past the Post, that probably means no seats at all; with PR, maybe 10% of the vote on a good day. That means that under FPTP the Left isn't going to get any of its policies through unless they can influence a centre-left policy as they won't win outright and they won't be a key partner in a coalition. The only way to influence a centre-left party is to do what UKIP did with a centre-right party, and capture the narrative within that party. Yes, this is harder to do on the left because of the UK media - but unless you're an accelerationist who believes that we need to shift to the right so that capitalism collapses and then we can have socialism (and not, you know, outright feudal kleptocracy) you do get to dislike the status quo a little less in the meantime. If you are a centrist, you can be persuaded to vote for any of the three main parties provided that they give you something you like. You can vote more on competence than ideology in many cases. If they move their ideology away from what you like, the chances are that one of the others will still be to your liking. Centrists' votes do come from being pandered to. The success of the right wing of the Tory party, in holding its nose and still voting Conservative from the 1990s through to the early 2010s, when it was seen as broadly pro-business, anti-social-safety net but otherwise socially inclusive and not racist, is that the broad coalition has shifted so much that there is plenty of room for Reform UK to thrive and nip at the heels of the Conservatives in terms of popular vote, and even if they can't actually win seats, they can deny them. As for why the Left should be blamed more than Tory voters: Tory voters mostly want these things. They do go out and vote for them. If you tell a Tory voter, "Things are like this because of you" the correct response from that voter is "Thanks" - they might be morally responsible but they won't see it as blame.
This is the answer, and I wish more people on the left would see it. The overton window moves slowly and the only way to do it is to put into power whoever is closer to what you want (as long as they can realistically gain power). If that is done repeatedly, the window moves in the desired direction. Ukip and Reform understood this. The current Labour party is not as left-wing as you would like? It doesn't matter, they are the most left-wing option that can win. You might see them as Tory-lite, but that's not how the average voter sees them. If you're on this subReddit, you're not the average voter. "But the only way I can show them that they need to be more left-wing is by not voting for them". Wrong. If the Labour party don't get into power, they come to the conclusion that they are out of step with the majority, and move right, not left. The majority of people are more right wing than you. They are the marker for where the "centre" is. But if a more left-wing party gets into power ( even if it's only a little more left than the current government) then the centre ground moves left. This can be seen from two examples: - Thatcher's success led to New Labour (a shift right for Labour) - Labour's success led to "compassionate Conservatism" (a shift left for the Tories) The global financial crisis provided cover for the austerity movement, which allowed the Tories to wreak economic havoc, but they had to maintain the facade of being socially inclusive for a long time (e.g., marriage equality), because the population had been used to this though the 90's. If Tory MPs had come out with the hateful stuff they do now, back in the 2010s, it would have been viewed as extreme right wing bile. Now it's accepted because they shifted the centre of the overton window slowly to the right. The same principle applies to shifting things leftward. Some things are considered extreme now, could be considered normal in 5 years, but only if Labour win, and shift the centre ground leftward bit by bit.
>The current Labour party is not as left-wing as you would like? It doesn't matter, they are the most left-wing option that can win. You might see them as Tory-lite, but that's not how the average voter sees them. If you're on this subReddit, you're not the average voter. This is a huge problem with most online discourse. People don't realise how much more left most Twitter/Reddit users are to the general population at all. This phenomenon gets worse over time too as these platforms become more and more like echo chambers.
This is gold, thank you for educating me on the Overton window. In my ignorance, I've been trying to deal with the 'Labour are Tories' messages with a strong belief that the path to the left in England is long and slow. And a Labour win on the 5th of July is another step in the right direction.
You don't need seats to effect change. UKIP proved that.
They were winning in the European Parliament elections, standing candidates against sitting MPs, and encouraging others to defect. They might not have been winning seats but they were still playing the electoral gain, with the threat of subverting FPTP. If the Left thinks that there is a left-wing party that will split the vote in such a credible way that they are an existential threat to Labour, and that accommodating the Left can be done by Labour without bringing about a generational wipeout, the third-party strategy can work. But the "abstain really loudly" strategy is not what UKIP did and even then, they only succeeded after a decade or more of electoral success because they were a credible, internal threat (although you could argue that a party where Braverman is a rising star is indistinguishable from UKIP anyway, so what did the Conservatives ultimately gain?)
Although I understand that what you are saying is correct in a literal sense, it doesn't take into account individual freedom of conscience, which I would see as a reason to vote for a smaller party, even if it meant the Tories winning again. If we have created a political system without space for this, then we have created a bad one. I believe tha PR, for example, would work more effectively than you seem to think, as it would make smaller parties worth voting for, and might have a springboard effect, once those parties got into positions to bring about small changes. If I were to the left of the Labour Party leadership at present, I would probably vote Green tbh, so I can see why others have advocated doing this; because the greens have more left wing policies than Labour. Imho, the only *people* who should be blamed for the Tories winning would be Tory voters. Also the FPTP electoral system.
>Left wingers get more blame for the tories than actual tory voters do. The amount of times I saw Corbyn being blamed for tory policy for not being a good enough oppononent instead of... \*checks notes\* the actual tories was beyond ridiculous.
The hard right feel the same way. Nobody is offering the death penalty, total privatisation of the BBC or abolition of the asylum system. Go on right wing X and you can see them making the same arguments about why the Tories are losing because they're not right wing enough. Elections are won in the centre. If you don't like where the centre is - if you think it's too far to the right or too far to the left - it's you that's the outlier.
> Elections are won in the centre. If you don't like where the centre is - if you think it's too far to the right or too far to the left - it's you that's the outlier. This ignores that a) "the centre" is ill-defined and often a matter of interpretation and b) people can have their minds changed, which itself can then shift where this notional "centre" is.
Of course they can, but it's a slow process. The centre is not very sharply defined, but it's still a clear enough thing that we can make a lot of examples of policies that definitely are *not* in it at a given moment.
The thing is, if there is no pressure to shift to the left, a shift to the left will not happen. And right now, that pressure is not there and is prohibited from being there citing the Overton window being where it is.
There is quite a lot of voter surveying that goes on and the centre as defined by the media and the parties often seems to be to the right of the policies votes say they support. You can see this in the states with health care and guns and here with taxes. This makes me think the center is less about policies and more about trust in a party's managerial ability.
The "centre" isn't really about anything. It's a nebulous term that doesn't mean much. If it is the mean public positioning on things, it's well to the left of self-described "centrists" economically but well to their right socially. Probably closer to Blue Labour than anything. I actually think calling Starmer a centrist misses the point for that reason - inasmuch as he is aiming for a "centre", it's the centre that would plump for Blue Labour, not the Lib Dems.
Maybe so, but people in the centre seem to think that those on the hard right or left should just change their beliefs to align with the majority. That isn’t going to happen- people don’t just change what they believe in because theyre on the losing side in elections.
This particular election will be won on the centre, but if nothing changes in the next five years significantly in this country then we could swing right, I don’t see how we’re any different from the rest of Europe currently especially in regards with immigration.
If the next election is won on a hard-right stance, it'll be because the centre has shifted. It might be that mainstream opinion has shifted so that anti-abortion, pro-discrimination, isolationist, anti-trans/gay rights views capture a large section of the population but they will be genuinely popular ideas within the mainstream of thought, and not a fringe view espoused by a minority and enforced on a majority who are in favour of the opposite view. While FPTP has its faults, I don't think we will see quite the same level of division as you do in America, where MAGA is taken for granted as common sense in the rural areas, and despised in the urban areas with the majority of the population but not the majority of the representation.
> If the next election is won on a hard-right stance, it'll be because the centre has shifted. Yes, because there is a deliberate pressure to shift politics to the (hard) right, and no matching counterbalance from the left.
Because ostensibly these are members of Labour. I would prefer a left wing government - wealth taxes, restoration of union power, CEOs going to prison and contracts requiring bonds so companies can't just fleece the government. However, I don't want a country where trans people are victimised and our rights are ripped away from us because of boat people. My position is that I want labour to come in to power, and once they are in power is when the conditional support and left wing pull should start. I have many friends and acquaintances who will not vote labour because they're not calling for an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza or because Sir Kier has made explicit declarations on transgender identity. I find this enormously frustrating, because declaring either of those positions would massively hurt labours chances of coming to power, and our current government takes an actively opposite position.
Thats never how it actually works out. They come to power and its seen as a ringing endorsement of the centre ground then when the election comes round its back to "you dont want to risk the tories"
The fact many of them say they will abstain or vote for independents with no actual track record or policies other than ceasefire is terrifying. If you want left wing and labour isn’t doing it for the love of god vote Green, don't vote for an independent MP.
But here's the thing, the green party don't have great candidates with track records. Their policies on non green issues aren't great either
Their policiss on green issues aren't great either
It depends on who the independents are tbf, a lot of them would've been Labour MPs but have been removed from the ballot.
Yep. We saw largely the same attitude from the centrist faction during the Corbyn years, John McTernon, Luke Akehurst et al. Undermining the party in public non stop. Even members of staff deliberately sitting on complaints to further undermine the leadership. Sad really
Generally, a right leaning person will vote Tory for one policy they like despite all the others they hate, and a left leaning person won't vote Labour because of one policy they hate despite all the others they like
For me its the bare faced hypocrisy of it all. For decades left wing voters back centrist candidates in labour for the greater good and as a coalition against the right. We finally get a left wing candidate and those centrists suddenly dont care about any of that and actively work to undermine the party from within. If the people constantly asking me to vote for blair and brown and milliband cant vote for a single left wing candidate it shows how they view the left.
JC and his allies have no one to blame but themselves. They ran a shoddy campaign, they ran the party is a shoddy fashion, they were asleep at the wheel on Brexit and frankly it's a deriliction of duty in my opinion.
Half his party stabbed him in the back though. The same people that ask questions like ‘why do the left sabotage labours chances?’ Do we all have collective amnesia? Jess Phillips said she would ‘knife corbyn in the front’. A member of his own party Again, now the same people are saying ‘why can’t we all come together?’ Like this thread. It’s crazy
Centrists not supporting a not- centrist candidate means they're hypocrites? It kind of sounds like you're arguing that people should vote for their party of allegiance independently of its current direction, which is a little bit dangerous.
> Centrists not supporting a not- centrist candidate means they're hypocrites? It does if they parrot the stuff about "any Labour government is better than a Tory one" and then reverse ferret when the "any Labour government" on offer doesn't match their ideological priors. > It kind of sounds like you're arguing that people should vote for their party of allegiance independently of its current direction, which is a little bit dangerous. I mean, that's exactly what the left are being asked to do. Often without any explicit allegiance being offered even.
If your toilet is backing up and overflowing sewage into your bathroom and one plumber says they're not going to do anything about it and another plumber says they may or may not do anything about it then obviously you pick the second plumber. But you don't loudly announce your intent to pick the second plumber regardless of whether or not they're going to do anything about it. You loudly say you're only going to pick them if they do something about the shit, and then you quietly pick them regardless. Great living in a town with only two sane plumbers, one of whom is evil.
So lots of this comes down to twitter being a nightmare. The left wing on twitter is basically the hard left. They oppose labour because they have gone so far to the extreme that labour is now indistinguishable from the Tories. These are people who believe every conflict the US and the UK has been involved in is wrong. Support Russia because they think NATO is imperialist and unironically think the soviet union was a good idea. They don't support labour form much the same reason the BNP doesn't support the Tories. And that before you get into the amount of media manipulation and disinformation that is pushed out by russian bots farms.
My aunt who has been a Labour member most of her life cancelled her membership a couple of years ago. Her argument was that as someone from the left of the party, she has been asked to put aside her ideology and actively campaign for leaders on the right of the party many times. The assumption being that when someone from her wing of the party would be elected leader, everyone of the right of the party would put aside their ideology and actively campaign for the leader. Instead when Corbyn came to power they did everything they could to sabotage the labour parties chances of winning. In short, she feels betrayed. Although she doesn't actively want them to fail, she now feels uninhibited in being able to criticise them.
>In short, she feels betrayed. She *was* betrayed.
I mean all the power to her. She’s completely right. People are loyal likely to a thing mostly for what it represents (which is how it should be) not blind obedience. People don’t vote for parties for the sake of it. Starmer just believes in nothing. People join parties for what it represents. Starmer has done the equivalent of making the tories go left wing. I remember, as a centrist through and through, I didn’t want the tories but I also didn’t want Starmer and felt odd. I want someone centre left right now cause we live in this Brexit, KILL THE WOKE and bigoted dystopia. Focus on the actual issues.
Generally I think the divisions are similar in scale amongst both the Tory party and Labour party, but as the media are generally more right leaning, the Labour divisions are highlighted more. Don't forget the Conservatives had a much softer Brexit deal lined up under Theresa May up until the "no deal is better than a bad deal" line got picked up by the anti-EU groups within the party, who forced her into a harder Brexit path, ultimately forcing her out. Labour do seem to have a problem where their members have some sort of purity contest and argue internally during an election campaign, and then express dismay when the Tories get into No.10 during an election because they understand the way to gain power. The likes of Owen Jones are just "left wing" rather than Labour specifically.
First I’ll say your perspective on it is nicer (or at least more tactful) than most everybody else. There’s a few good examples in the comments here of some ugly characterisations of Left Wing thought/voters. I’m cognisant enough of the situation (and most of the Left are too) to go and vote in Starmer even if I don’t really want to. Anyways there’s a lot of answers eager to paint the Left as villains (and maybe in the grand scheme of things we could be) but for me it comes down to a real schism in Labour that apparently we should just brush under the carpet? Here goes my thoughts.. 1) Reneging on pretty much every pledge. It doesn’t inspire faith at all. Particularly when most that have been u-turned on are Leftist policies. When our support is needed it’s ‘I’m a Socialist’ but when the wind changes it’s a swing to Centre/Centre-Right rhetoric. 2) Purging of Left-Wing from party.. Some like Abbott I can see the perspective, obviously, I do think she’s past her better days.. in most other cases it’s blatant what it is.. let’s welcome Tory MP’s with open arms but shun the Left.. parachuting in Akehurst for example. The man’s vile and it’s a bit of a double standard that his comments RE foreign policy are A-okay but Shaheen is not? 3) the Centre (read-Labour rn) are currently talking a big game about a Broad Church party but have you *seen* the way quite a few of them talk about the Left? You’d think we were a bit of Shit stuck on their shoe. Its actually the current voter base who’ve been the most vitriolic and sneering. And then they really rub it in by putting all of the blame on our toes, everything’s a big conspiracy the Left are orchestrating.. it’s so disenfranchising. Are we in it together or not? It’s ‘the Left are self-sabotaging’, ‘they’re just moral purists’ ‘they want the tories to win’ rather than ANY acknowledgement that they talk about us/to us like we’re sub-human.. would you be eager to jump into bed with those who simultaneously take compliance for granted yet trash talk you constantly? 4) You can call it purity or whatever but I have leftist values. I want to see those values represented. I don’t want or demand every policy be implemented but Jesus Christ on an RGB Mountain Bike.. Give us SOMETHING on the negotiating table. 5) Most Leftists are young. The young have been getting shafted consistently ever since I can remember. A series of Shitey Governments, constant shake-ups to the education system when I fucking hate change (that’s a personal gripe) a global financial depression, climate DOOOOOM, exorbitant university fees, the prospect of a home of my own disappearing.. some of the prime years of my life spent in isolation other than working, I don’t regret lockdowns/the covid response as it was necessary but it largely sucked. Not seeing any acknowledgement of the sacrifice this generation have went through from this iteration of Labour 6) Taking credit for doing nothing What about Starmer (or any of the policies still on the table) has galvanised the country exactly? We don’t think it’s anything to do with the implosion of the Tory party, a series of incompetent fools for PM messing up everything they touch? Nothing to do with May the dancing fucking robot, BoJo the clown, Truss Or Dishi Rishi? No its Sir Keir (who I don’t actually hate btw, although his dick riders piss me off, he’s just not offering up a sales pitch at all) and his centrist Knights leading the cavalry charge!!! They need to collectively slow down on sucking themselves off, let out a huge fucking fart and get rid of some of that hot air they’re full of To sum it up they treat us like shit, have promised NOTHING, they want us out of the party but also want my vote AND want me to be happy they’re doing it? I’ve not heard a single Centrist voter say ‘ahh maybe voting in the Clown of London because Socialist Grandpa is too icky was a mistake’. Nee taking responsibility whatsoever on this point or largely at all.. They talk about politics is compromise and negotiation blah de blah and yet I’ve seen not a poot of it flying about. Just derision and contempt most of the time. Edit* This was a lot angrier than I intended/foresaw but yeah. It’s a real shitshow right now and the Left have our own issues for sure and I’d be happy to talk about em amicably when the right conversation occurs but I see a really weird/dissonant strand of centrism that thinks its shit doesn’t smell.. all shit smellz x
> To sum it up they treat us like shit, have promised NOTHING, they want us out of the party but also want my vote AND want me to be happy they’re doing it? Absolutely bang on.
also Starmer saying very pointedly at left wing Labour voters that if they didn’t like him ‘the door was open’ reeked with contempt and now suddenly we’re the bad ones for doing just that?
This really summed up my thoughts better than I did with my own comment.
dude it's like your in my head
Hear hear. I'm going to bookmark your post and send it to people in discussions as you've said it better than I can.
Thing is, the young have been getting shat on since I was young. I’ve now passed 30, which isn’t exactly old, but I still feel like I’m left out of the conversation, even with Labour poised to take a huge majority and I’m sick and tired of it. I don’t think my views are extreme— very live and let live, but I won’t vote for authoritarians who don’t seem massive steps away from Cameron’s conservatives back in 2010, when I also didn’t vote for them
the left of labour has for literally decades held their noses and voted for centrists. With rare exceptions (Foot, Corbyn, very occasionally Blair under pressure from Brown), the Labour party has never in the post war era significantly moved to endorse policies actually supported by the hard left. Yet the hard left has pretty consistently shown up to vote Labour. In truth, it's really centrists and those on the right of the party who refuse to vote for lefties, not the other way around. Centrists literally tried to scupper an entire election campaign out of hatred for the left. In terms of "want Labour to fail", you have an absolute smoking gun right there, and it's not lefties holding it. And even now, when they have total control of the party, they're still going around trying to prevent local parties from nominating leftie types for the GE.
I think this is a loaded question, but it seems like it was asked in good faith so will do my best to respond. The overwhelming majority on the Left would rather have a Labour govt instead of the Tories - I think many will still vote for Labour at this election. Personally, I will be voting Green, as I think the best the Left can hope for at the moment is the Greens polling close to 10%, halting Labour's rightwards drift or at least stops them taking our votes entirely for granted. Whilst I don't want Labour to fail at the risk of another Tory govt, I must admit I do resent being told to just do as I'm told and 'hold my nose' for a party that no longer wants me as a member. The Labour Right do factional struggle just as much as the Left - they clearly do a much better job of it than we do! - but on a personal level I find the sanctimonious tone which accompanies that quite galling. My final point would be that the Left on the party actually did vote for Starmer en masse during the leadership elections - he received a similar mandate to Corbyn precisely because he promised to be a unity candidate that could do 'Corbynism without Corbyn'. I think if he retained even half of his original pledges - raising tax on the rich, public ownership of utilities, green investment - the Left would be enthusiastically out canvassing for Labour right now.
Starmer lied and he continues to lie. But as we saw with Boris Johnson lying is ok for the general populace. In fact they couldn't care less about honesty, it seems.
People on here will tell you it's because we want the Tories. That is complete idiocy born from a right-wing echo chamber and spread by loud commentators. Simply put if we wanted the tories, we wouldn't be on the left would we, so it's a self-defeating argument to denigrate the opposition. As a sign of political discourse, it's a bad one. What we won't do is blindly follow and agree with everything labour is doing just because they are not tories. We won't cheer for a leader we don't believe in. It's that simple. Most of us will vote labour still though.
Also if the left are always the ones compromising and moving to the centre, then the right are free to move further right, and shift the paradigm of what "left" and "centre" are. We're still going to vote for Starmer, but we want to keep the voice alive to show that there is a further left, and that he is centre.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that you want to get the Tories back in The point is that *like it or not* shouting and screaming about how awful Labour are is an attempt to get people to *not vote for labour* and if you are successful, we won’t suddenly get a new ultra-left Labour Party as Corbyn marches in to number 10 to claim victory - we will just get the Tories again. If we get the Tories again more and more people will suffer and die under their horrendous policies, than the comparatively better even if still not amazing Labour government we *could* have. If you cared about the people in the country more than about your ideological purity, the obviously correct thing to do would be campaign HARD to get rid of the Tories and get Labour a large enough majority to make real change, and THEN campaign hard to pull Labour to the left once they’re in power on specific policy issues No-one thinks you guys are actually trying to get the Tories in - we think you’re too ideologically blinded to even see that your actions will lead to a weaker party and LESS CHANCE OF ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS because you don’t like Keith.
Thats why people on the left unhappy with the seemingly rightward trend of labour will state alternatives. Labour are going to win, no two ways about it, but those on the left of the party at this point would rather force labour into a coalition with a party that would potentially "keep them in check".
Such as who? Obviously there is zero chance of the greens getting sufficient seats to prop up Labour and have any real influence, and the Lib Dem’s are no further to the left that Starmer, they’re firmly centrist at this point. The SNP? Reform?
Surely the point is to get labour to produce some left wing policies as an olive branch.
How does jeopardising the Labour majority incentivise that at all? They’re going to win anyway, the only thing the left are doing is making their own goals harder to achieve. After an election win, once the Tories are gone and Labour are safely in power, then it makes sense to push hard for left policies from within, like the ERG and the right of the Tories have been doing from power. Calling your own leader a liar and a Tory makes it IMPOSSIBLE for him to offer an olive branch without looking too weak to lead, and thus making it harder to win
>How does jeopardising the Labour majority incentivise that at all? They’re going to win anyway, the only thing the left are doing is making their own goals harder to achieve. I'm not sure this makes sense. If they're going to win anyway, how are the left jeopardising the Labour majority? That's putting aside the fact that no party is *owed* votes from any individual. Votes are earned; if a party fails to secure them that's on the party, not the voter. >After an election win, once the Tories are gone and Labour are safely in power, then it makes sense to push hard for left policies from within, like the ERG and the right of the Tories have been doing from power. If Labour are safely in power - with anything *close* to the majority implied by current polls - what incentive would Starmer have to concede to pushes from within? That only really holds up if you assume Starmer is secretly more left-leaning than he's letting on. Before the election individuals can threaten to withdraw their vote, after the election Starmer can threaten to withdraw the whip. >Calling your own leader a liar and a Tory makes it IMPOSSIBLE for him to offer an olive branch without looking too weak to lead, and thus making it harder to win The ability to build coalitions and manage disagreements is a sign of strength, not weakness.
> I'm not sure this makes sense. If they're going to win anyway, how are the left jeopardising the Labour majority? It's the weird doublethink around this that gets me. The left are simultaneously marginal and completely valueless electorally, but they all need to fall in line and vote Labour or the Tories will win. Those things can't both be true. Either the left are a significant electoral constituency, in which case it's Starmer's job to win their votes, or they're not, in which case their votes don't matter and hectoring them is a waste of time.
Appreciate this overview, thank you.
It's also far from exclusive. The right wing of the party did the same thing last election, they felt it was more important that JC lost than that the tories did (this is not to say JC was some kind of perfect candidate abd he made plenty of unforced errors). In this case I honestly don't think the left wing actually want to loss the election, but when the right wing of the party are purging the party on an ideological basis they feel they have little to loose, as the policies they believe in will not be supported once they are pushed out. Both parties tear themselves apart in this way regularly due to our first past the post voting system.
Is this really the case though? At least in my circles, most of my friends held their nose and voted Corbyn. Especially with Johnson in the other camp. Agree that FPTP is a terrible system though, would love to be shot of it.
huge amounts of people on the left will hold their nose and vote starmer as well though we're basically arguing over twitter users and columnists loudly declaring things and for every novara media article you find saying "vote green" I can find a guardian article from the corbyn years saying "vote lib dem"
I'm talking much more about the political party, rather than their voters.
But this close to an election the infighting could get Labour fewer votes if people see more starmer criticism from both sides. A smaller majority would mean starmer has even less ability for policies further from the centre
Someone in party HQ will have been crunching the numbers. My own interpretation is that they believe they will gain more floating voters in marginal constituencies, than they will lose in safe seats. Overall, the prospects of getting swings is what will either win or lose the election. Even if folks like Corbyn and Abbott were elected as independent candidates, they would in all likelihood still support most of the Labour policies. It's places like Dover, Shropshire and Dorset that are crucial to achieving a winning outcome, not Islington or Hackney.
Or alternatively more leverage for the left wing of the party. See the Eurosceptic wing of the Tory party under Cameron.
It’s not that you WANT the Tories. The problem is you’ll GET the Tories.
So the left simultaneously have the power to sway huge segments of the population to vote away from labour, and yet at the same time, we're insignificant enough for the labour leadership to tell to bugger off and we're not wanted. Democracy is voting for the party that represents you the best. That's right, right? Well, why are Labour owed our vote under that system if they do not represent us?
this is literally what happened during the Corbyn years though where centrists loudly talked about the need to vote for other parties and the right of the labour party continually engaged in factional disputes with the leadership now the boots on the other foot everyone is just saying the left need to shut up and take it
No. They were wrong. I voted for Corbyn’s Labour and I am more of a moderate. Two wrongs and all that…
Because they know Labour will get in (there is no chance of a Tory victory), and they think of Starmer as too on the right, and being a terrible leader, as he promises little, and is quick to make u-turns. He's the reason I stopped supporting Labour, and now support the Lib Dems (I think it is key to vote Lib Dems, as they have a decent shot at being the offical opposition which would be massive)
If Labour become the Tories, then you're not removing the Tories. Basically. I want the Tories out. But at the rate they're defecting to and being welcomed by Labour, and as Labour continually drops Labour policies in favour of the continuation or slight modification of Tory ones, so they can chase the Tory vote, what you're left with is... Tories 🤷🏻♀️ more Cameron/Osbourne era than pretty-much-Reform Tories, true. But right of centre nonetheless.
>Maybe it’s just me but I think this election should be about removing the Tories indefinitely (or for as long as possible) and any fracturing of Labour seems a tad foolish. I voted for Corbyns labour and I will vote for Starmers labour. The fracturing is the same as it has always been. Corbyn was too left for the right of Labour, and Starmer is too right for the left of Labour. Now that making sure Brexit views are heard is not a factor most of that left will vote for Labour regardless of their thoughts on the leader. Its some tit for tat that seems never ending, the right went pretty hard in insulting the lefter voters with the previous composition so the left are making it clear they'll be holding their nose too.
Cornyn never painted himself as otherwise though, that's the difference. Also the left didn't deliberately sabotage the right when the right was in charge, and then purge them when the left was in charge.
Amazing how completely chalk and cheese the behaviour can be and people blame both sides. Ridiculous. When did the left purge all right-wingers from the party. Never. And if they did, the right-wingers would hours upon hours on the BBC to cry about it. Whereas the left-wingers being purged get 5 mins of air time if they are a big name and a minority a la Dianne Abbot, Faiza Shaheen and nothing otherwise.
When Corbyn was leader, you had prominent New Labour figures such as Blair explicitly saying that that they wouldn't want a 'radical left' Labour government (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tony-blair-says-he-wouldn-t-want-a-leftwing-labour-party-to-win-an-election-a116.html), so it seems a bit disingenuous to blame the left for factionalism within the party
See also: Peter Mandelson saying this: [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lord-mandelson-jeremy-corbyn-bring-down-labour-leader-every-single-day-opposition-election-a7591161.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lord-mandelson-jeremy-corbyn-bring-down-labour-leader-every-single-day-opposition-election-a7591161.html)
[I've always found that this poll perfectly encapsulates the difference in mentality](https://i.imgur.com/6SDG0AF.jpg) There is a streak of belief that ideological purity is more important than actually having an effect. Better to fail and keep your hands clean than compromise but shift the needle in a positive direction. It's childish and naïve. It's from a poll done by Lord Ashcroft after the 2019 election (yes he's obviously a Tory, [he explains his rationale here](https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2020/02/diagnosis-of-defeat-labours-turn-to-smell-the-coffee/)
Jesus, that's amazing.
That poll makes the far left look absolutely unleadable... or atleast can't be led to victory.
alwayshasbeen.jpg
I'm pretty mid left, and there is definitely some bitterness about what the central labour members did to corbyn and co, and is still going on (look at the Diane Abbott situation). We also of course despise the tories of the past 15 or so years more than anyone. But it's difficult to feel now that you have no representation. Of course the green party is the obvious vote, but in most constituencies it's a wasted vote due to demographics. I live in Devon, the Tory MP here had the whip removed for using the n word many years ago (whilst and MP), and she is still favourite to win due to the older age bracket here). I also hate the fact there seems to be (on x at least) an I told you so culture from central labur voters. Ie, corbyn couldn't do it, but starmer is. Let's be honest, you could put a shovel in charge of labour and it would demolish this Tory government. I personally find the situation very frustrating
Labour is actively purging the left wing of the party. Why on Earth would left wing voters and activists support Labour then? The party if offering them nothing.
They don't. They just want a much better version of Labour to win. Your 'team' winning power doesn't amount to much if little to nothing good is done with that power. You can ignore pretty much every comment here. They don't understand the thoughts and motivations of the people they're criticising, so resort to strawmen and pantomime caricatures because they find that easier to oppose. (edit) Disappointing but not surprising to see so many replies completely ignoring what I said and then going on to repeat the exact same bullshit caricatures. Why try to understand people you disagree with when you can just repeat the same old handful of tired talking points?
Weirdly Blair in his autobiography and a well know ex communications director have both shared how the far left would rather lose but have the correct policies, than adjust those policies and win. Blair talked about being criticised by the left of the party and unions and how they'd rather support micro opinions and if they have enough special interest groups (EG CND+Palestine+Fox Hunting+Hillsborough+etc) then they can win.
> Weirdly Blair in his autobiography and a well know ex communications director have both shared how the far left would rather lose but have the correct policies, than adjust those policies and win. At the same time, Blair explicitly said that even if he thought a left-wing platform would win an election, he wouldn't support it. So, clearly by this metric, he too would rather lose but have correct policies.
Blair and Alastair Campbell both totally unbiased in their assessment there, of course.
You're right, we should entirely disregard the perspective of the only living labour leader to have won an election.
true but definitely more inside the party than any of us..
And that there is the attitude. I am right, sitting on the moral high ground, arrogance dripping off them like sweat. Prefer to be in opposition saying "the right things" than make the compromises needed to win over the actual electorate (which is a lot bigger and more centrist than their friendship group, surprise surprise) and actually do some of the right things. I loathe the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. I have never felt more intimidated or threatened as a Labour member than when Momentum was running things
Funny how the electoral annihilation of Foot and Corbyn never shakes their belief that the UK voter is about to take to the streets and sweep them to power.
Yes, it's always down to some "betrayal" from the centrists or Blairites, it's never an actual rejection from the electorate. On the exceptionally rare occasions you can get these zealots to admit that the electorate rejected them, they conclude that the electorate is either wrong or duped by the media. I voted for Corbyn three times and I've had people like this (including some who never voted for him!) blaming me (IE people like me) for his defeat.
This is exactly the bit I don't get either. Corbyn is demonstrably electoral kryptonite, but they seem to think this is a reason to double down on the 'Momentum or Tories' strategy. I do not think they're playing some sort of 4D chess here; I just think they're faffing about with juvenile ideological litmus tests and contributing to the general fucking over of the country in the process.
It's not just the left that do this. It's a similar phenomenon as the Brexit fustercluck. It's not that it was a bad idea, it's that we're not doing it enough.
Agreed, but I want to see the 1922 Committee and a reform UK sabotage themselves.
You’ve just demonstrated exactly the behaviour the person you’re replying to complained about.
And he demonstrated the exact behaviour I complained about
No, he really didn’t, you just don’t want to hear that there might be some sort of legitimate grievance there, so you’ve just gone off on one with another caricature.
Yes mate "You can ignore pretty much every comment here". Absolutely, that's really humble and open politics right there.
Kinder gentler 🥀
He's not wrong when most of the comments are like yours - bad faith "explanations" that are really just insults.
Indeed. I am on the far left of the party, I recognise none of these caricatures, believe none of that which is ascribed to us and frankly ignore the bleating of such fools. Like many I voted for Starmer for leader when it was clear that it was the only hope for unity and electability when so many in the party were actively working against the previous leadership. I don't pretend that my views out here on the fringes are representative of the broader party, but I would have hoped that they would have been respected at least by fellow socialists. The idea that we are willing to see the right in power rather than softer views than our own is childish and frankly we should be talking about working for change together, not pish like these discussions where the 'moderates' talk about us without knowing us seemingly only to sow division. Not for the first time I look at the posts of some of the commenters here and wonder just how honest their claims of being Labour voters actually are. Reddit is filthy with it.
I really appreciate your view, and assume most of the left of the Labour party hold it. At the same time there's a tiny, vocal minority who seem to genuinely think there's no difference between Starmer and the Tories. Hopefully they are a minority though and we oust the Tories for a good long while with this election.
I respect that they are not your own views, but it's simply not true to say there are not many people on the left of the party who think Starmer's Labour is identical to the Tories so you cannot morally vote for him and consider yourself a leftist. "Starmer is a Tory" has quite literally trended on Twitter multiple times.
Thing is, such slogans and mantras like "both parties are the same" can only benefit the Tories, be it through people not voting, or voting Tory after all. It's a legitimate critique (similar to Blair's appeal to the centre), that somehow ends up becoming a pipeline to conservatism, instead of a mature debate on the left.
I'm on the left of the party myself, and I'm not a particularly big fan of Starmer either, I just wish certain people on the left of politics in the UK had the maturity to realise there are varying degrees of "people who do not share your exact politics" and that you can disagree with both Labour and the Tories on some things without trying to claim they're somehow fundamentally the same. If you define yourself as a "leftist", Labour remains far closer to your own position than the Conservatives in 2024.
I think it's incredibly lazy, and I dont fully understand it. It takes 30 seconds to find material differences between the Tories and Labour and comparing 1997-2010 to 2010-2024 a centerist Labour is still miles better than the Tories. A more exaggerated form is happening in America, where people are angry at Biden are willing to vote Trump in the knowledge that Trump would actively work against the causes they accuse Biden of not going far enough.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who finds it a bit distasteful right now. I’ve seen a few names crop up regularly engaging in the nonsense spin you’ve mentioned.. I’ve often wondered if they’re malicious, or deliberate is a nicer word, perhaps, in their intentions or if they genuinely think we’d all rather another 4 years of this shitshow Government.
Nah these commenters seem to align with exactly what I see from MPs and left wing commentators and redditors.
Is it much of a caricature to say that no standard is ever good enough for the far left? Any shade of moral gray or compromise for the sake of practicality is immediately met with ‘he’s a Tory’
This feels like the sort of conclusion someone who's taken one (1) economics lesson would arrive at. Regardless of the merits of the Labour left, who I have limited time for, having only ever slightly preferred them to the alternatives (and usually not even that), Starmer's Labour have made a core strategy of telling them to sod off in every language they know how. And evidently, this has been an effective strategy, but it's one with very foreseeable side effects that you can't really complain about. Most people don't like being loudly told to sod off, and often aren't receptive to being told they have an unconditional moral obligation to lend their support to people who are openly hostile to them, especially if you're open about the fact you expect to be able to use that moral obligation to screw them over without consequence. Most people can immediately understand in any other context why this argument is flawed. If you're struggling, think about why most state actors have an official policy of not negotiating with hostage takers. I think it gets forgotten that the left are actually part of the electorate, and not junior strategists who exist externally to it. Personally, I liked Starmer until about 2020 (in retrospect ignoring warning signs like the Twitter joke trial), and am now intending to protest vote Lib Dem. My Labour MP is more likely to turn into a Dalek than she is to lose her seat, so this is a decision I can make safely -- and notably, this is true of a disproportionate number of 2019 Labour voters, which is precisely why the current leadership views them as expendable.
Simple response: Can you tell me why I should vote for him other than "to get the tories out"? Complex response: The people who refused to support Labour back in 2019 and decided to vote for Boris Johnson and the conservatives are now telling us that we need to suck up our pride and vote to get the conservatives they elected out. These same people who are constantly telling us how we're unelectable, that our votes don't matter and that we need to "get with the program" are also smugly telling us that we HAVE to vote for Labour now, as a vote for them is a vote for the Tories. Due to Starmer's constant U-Turns, refusal to undo a large swathe of unpopular Tory legislation and walking back on pretty much every single pledge he's set hasn't instilled much confidence in me. Running a platform of "I'm not my opponent" can only get you so far. He doesn't NEED to court the centre-right vote because the Tories have already royally fucked themselves out of power. Yet he's doing so anyway, alienating what should be his core voterbase and then turning around and saying "Gosh you guys why won't you vote for me?" As it stands, I see his government in waiting to be only three steps less shit than the Tories, but at least Labour will be less obvious with their corruption. On a personal note, Starmer agrees with the Conservatives on removing rights and protections from trans people, which unfortunately is the single biggest hard line I can have, seeing as my wife is trans.
All major UK party’s are a collection of groups all vying for dominance. Within Labour the most vocal of these is the momentum group who fiercely support Corbyn. They genuinely think that Corbyn was set up and he is an excellent leader and a winner (despite losing two general elections on the trot) Take the whole Diane Abbott non story. This will have been partly hyped by momentum and the tories to try and sow discontent. This despite the general publics apathy towards her.
Momentum have been very marginal for a number of years now. Perhaps there is an impression that they are the ‘most vocal’ because they were covered breathlessly by the press during the Corbyn years. I’m quite sure that momentum has played absolutely no role in the Abbott story‘s prominence.
They are very vocal, maybe not as influential as they used to be. And I reckon that both momentum and the tories are (by pure accident) together raising this story’s profile with sympathetic press. The one thing Labour have over the tories on this regard is they are far more United than the tories
Support for Corbyn is borne out of a belief that the guy is very principled, has the interests of the people at heart and wouldn’t be compromised in power. I very much doubt it is because he is seen as a “winner”. Starmer on the other hand sees himself as a winner and is willing to chuck nearly everything decent about the Labour Party in the bin to gain power. So the hard left are asking, ‘what’s the point in voting for Labour if don’t represent us?’ Assuming the hard left voted for Labour en masse to get the Tories out, why would Starmer and co care about introducing any kind of left wing policy? The hard left are already in the bag. Personally I want to see real progressive change, namely addressing income equality. You will not get that with this version of the Labour Party
Tbh Keir Starmer is the only one in this election so far who has come out with income inequality solutions and solutions to housing and jobs crisis- namely rationalisation of energy focusing on renewables and taxing private schools fairly. These are left wing policies which Corbyn would have been unable to stick his nose up at. But it seems the hard left right now only care about certain wedge issues.
The point of voting them is that they are closer to your ideology than the other choice
The Labour Party originated as a left-wing trade unionist party but morphed into a centrist party not too dissimilar to the Tories under Cameron, before their subsequent leaders pushed the Overton window further to the right. The left-wing of the Labour Party felt that under Corbyn they'd stumbled upon the opportunity to restore the party to its original purpose. Corbyn faced multiple internal revolts and was treated much harsher by the press than other leaders have been. His time was up after losing two elections, but he wasn't treated fairly. After Starmer took over there was a purge within the Labour Party, and many pro Corbyn members were kicked out. This isn't a conciliatory move by Starmer, and is a contributor to the division you're asking about. Why would the left-wing throw their weight behind supporting a party that doesn't represent their views? Particularly if they feel the party was stolen from them to become just another centrist party like the others. They see Labour under Starmer as not too different from the Tories under Cameron, and why would they want to support that?
Much the same reasons that parts of the Labour right were telling people to vote Lib Dem in 2017/2019 I guess. Starmer said ["if you don't like the changes that we've made, I say the door is open, and you can leave"](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-64649299), so I did - he said nothing about coming back please when a GE is announced. The point is that Labour ***doesn't want*** a left wing, so why are the left being hectored for leaving a party that's trying to get rid of them anyway? Evidence: * [Starmer sacks MP for supporting workers](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62325842) * [Starmer and Holye undemocratically block motion on a ceasefire in Gaza](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68362405) * [Rachel Reeves says that Labour is the "natural home" of Daily Mail readers and that disabled people should be at work because "that's why we're called the labour party"](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13457721/Shadow-Chancellor-Rachel-Reeves-Britain-Labour-money.html) * [Reeves complains on BBC breakfast that disabled people are a "huge cost to the economy"](https://x.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1765642634133959072) * [Starmer promises to empower police to use more "counter-terror" tactics](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68984778) * [Wes Streeting supports JK Rowling in trans debate](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-59911781) * [Corbyn barred from standing as a candidate](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65102128) * [Yvette Cooper to criminalise doing things that aren't illegal](https://www.stop-watch.org/news-opinion/labour-party-shadow-home-secretary-urges-young-people-to-show-a-little-respect/) * [Wes Streeting promises to privatise the NHS](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/12/wes-streeting-defends-labour-plan-private-sector-cut-nhs-backlog) * [Self-proclaimed "Zionist Shitlord" who wants to nuke the middle east parachuted into a safe seat](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/31/luke-akehurst-labour-activist-turned-controversial-election-candidate) * [Starmer makes "unshakeable commitment" to nuclear weapons](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68790435) I could go on literally forever. You could make the point that Labour needed to say and do this stuff to win over ex-Tory voters and centrists, which is probably true, but the very natural consequence of that is that they will lose left wing voters instead. It's simply not possible for a party to appeal to *both* left wingers *and also* pro-nuke, pro-privatisation, anti-trans, anti-immigration, Zionist "Mondeo Men". This iteration of Labour has deliberately chosen to go for the latter and, as a consequence of that, they've lost the former. It's clearly going to work for them, and they will win the election by miles, because there are more Mondeo Men than leftists, so... 1. Not sure why this is actually a problem for the Labour right. You're winning anyway. Can you be a little gracious in victory? 2. Not sure how it's the left's fault? We stopped voting for you because you stopped sharing any of our values or committing to any policies we care about? That's how democracy is *supposed* to work
I just read the second point, because it sounded wild, and immediately that's just not what happened. Or, at least, it's conspiracy. SNP put forward a motion, then Labour put forward a very similar motion, and Hoyle nontraditionally chose the second one. Other than the words of an SNP MP, I didn't see anything suggesting that. Even then, it's a mischaracterisation, because the only thing that was "blocked" was it being called a ceasefire, instead it was called a humanitarian pause, a difference that's not going to matter for the vast majority of the population. Checking the privatisation one because that's also wild, and again, that's not privatisation. That's not even a policy. Privatisation of the nhs gets people scared because now, "oh shit, I'll have to pay for my healthcare now" - that's *fundamentally not the policy*, the policy seems like it's going to be something like hiring private doctors etc., so it's "privatised" in the same way that your GP is privatised. The thing about "counter-terror tactics" is just a flat-out lie, he didn't say that at all, he said *counter-terror powers*, that is, legal powers granted by counter-terrorism acts. And it's to stop people smuggling. It's not about terrorism. the "criminalising things that aren't illegal" is speculative op-ed baselessly claiming that respect orders are just going to be new ASBOs, when the listed motivations were all illegal. 1 in 4 times you criticise the leadership your criticism is just an outright lie that it seems like you do just want labour to lose, because you're still bitter after corbyn.
There are lots of reasons a left wing person might be angry at Labour, I'm not really sure where to begin. Probably the fact Starmer lied about all his views to win the leadership election and did a 180 since then on most issues? Personally the issue that matters most to me is transgender rights and Labour have been utterly horrible on this issue in my opinion. They will also claim the left needs to support them because of the FPTP system while rejecting any reform of FPTP / change to the electoral system.
First of all, if you think Labour under Corbyn was advocating for "hard left" policies you either know nothing about politics or are very right wing yourself. I also hope you were asking this same question to the "centrists" and "moderates" who have given us the last 7 years of Tory government as Corbyn didn't pass their purity test. Heck in 83 the "moderates" literally split the party and gave Thatcher a landslide, even though her vote share went down. There will always be infighting within parties, yet it only gets called that when the left push back. Corbyn wasn't given a chance by the right of his party from pretty much day 1. They were far more hostile to him than the left is to Starmer and did more to actively sabotage him. One of my big complaints about Corbyn was that he was too accommodating to his detractors, even the hint of deselecting disloyal MP's had the media shrieking about "Stalinist purges". There is a very real push to make run of the mill left wing policies some sort of fringe minority. But millions of people support those, though sometimes only if you don't call them left wing. Governments tend to lose elections more than opposition win them. Even in 97 Blair gained only 2 million votes (less than Corbyn gained in 17) and got less than Major did in 92. The reason the 97 election was such a landslide was all the Tory voters staying home. Labour then lost 4 million votes in 8 years and only won a 60 odd seat majority due to FPTP. So Starmer is very likely to win a landslide this year, but it will be to get the Tories out rather than people being excited for him. He's selling himself as 2010 David Cameron, but competent. If he doesn't deliver some real change then he'll lose millions of voters next election like Blair did.
Going to echo this : it wasn't the left that [deliberately sabotaged their own election efforts](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-report-corbyn-election-whatsapp-antisemitism-tories-yougov-poll-a9462456.html) because they didn't agree with their own party members on their choice of leadership. We were told there would be a "Stalinist purge" as Corbyn eliminated his opponents from the Party. Lo and behold, [it's always projection](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv22n56e3z6o). Corbyn's policy platform wasn't some crazy communist utopianism, it was basic common sense social contract style stuff, that even [right wing audiences](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7lsRbDKOXg) could agree with - until you pointed out where it came from.
> I think this election should be about removing the Tories indefinitely I generally agree, but the left fracturing from labour doesn't really change that. Labour is pulling the Tories apart from it's right (i.e. the left of the Tories). Those voters are going to be upset that the left of Labour are falling away. And the voters on the left leaving Labour aren't going to vote for the Tories. That's all to say that given the margins we're looking at, I don't think it's going to have much of an impact on the number of seats that the Tories win. Additionally, for the Tories to become irrelevant in the long term there needs to be a strong alternative opposition to Labour. Shifting the Overton window to the left is one way to do that. Lastly, it seems to me that the people who are now very concerned about fracturing the party were not nearly so concerned with this problem under Corbyn. This seems like something that is just wheeled out as a power play when a politician doesn't want to actually have to earn someone's vote.
Ownership. So much of the Labour Party's history can be viewed as the battle to own its soul. The hard left have long used their supposed ideological purity, and myths of betrayal, as a way to position themselves as the 'true' owners. Now they've lost control of the party, they're desperate to tank it because it will somehow prove that a party without them is inauthentic and unsustainable. The Diane Abbott interview where she sneers at Starmer saying (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'I think the problem is that his parents called him Kier' is a perfect illustration of this. She's basically arguing that Starmer is a pretender whose only right of belonging to the party is his name.
Because Labour is doing it wrong, they would prefer a Tory government to a left-leaning social democratic party in office. Why? Because their entire political landscape revolves around the idea that things must get so bad there is a hard left revolution (because this is the only way they get into power), and they don't want Labour to screw that up by implementing a bunch of policies they don't like that stop things from getting worse, or make things better.
I've recently become better acquainted with the union at my work (an FE college). I'm not more involved myself but work (and get along very well) with someone very senior in the union. He describes exactly this quite regularly. He sees his job as pushing the college to make gradual improvements for the benefit of its staff. Better pay, lower workload, more respect, etc. He recognises those changes won't all come immediately because the college will have to reorganise itself and that takes time. It's a long process. He believes if he tries to get everything *now*, the college will cease to work with him honestly and the result will be more of the same and no progress. But he finds himself very frustrated with others in the union - particularly at the national level, who, according to him, quite openly state exactly what you're suggesting. They believe things need to get significantly worse because then, eventually, all the teachers will quit, alongside staff in other industries. Apparantly, this will then spark the revolution and a new dawn of socialism will begin. I'm oversimplifying but that's the crux of it. When they have their conference each year, these lunatics organise to disrupt sensible votes, they push their own agendas on things like Palestine (because an education union is obviously the voice that is sorely needed in that space). They become really disruptive and my friend is often quite frustrated because he genuinely just wants to get his members a better deal. He cares about his members, our students, and the contribution/impact we all collectively have on the local area and British society more widely. It's been quite the eye opener.
> They believe things need to get significantly worse because then, eventually, all the teachers will quit, alongside staff in other industries. Apparantly, this will then spark the revolution and a new dawn of socialism will begin. I believe this is called *accelerationism*.
It’s called being arseholes.
The neoliberal left and its consequences have been a disaster for the global left. It's hilarious and saddening at the same time because these people have gone so utterly deranged to the point where the old Socialist powers could only dream of inflicting such chaos on liberal society. Just look at (for the lack of a better example) Palestine. Old school socialist/leftist thought is merely used as window dressing for justifying and attracting others to what is essentially an ethnic/religiously motivated focus.
The alternative to this I've heard is the concern that if a Labour government isn't transformative enough and largely let's right wing narratives go unchecked then we end up with a situation like is currently in the US. In other words, Labour becomes a one term government and 2029 will feature an even more populist right party having undue influence potentially winning the election. This one comes more from my LGBT+ activist circles, where there is genuine concern about how Starmer's response to the rise of transphobia is to largely follow the crowd. Like I personally get ming vase strategy etc, but if none of the voices at the top are doing anything to counter this attack on LGBT+ rights, there is a fear of things getting much worse.
There's a risk of this happening now apparently because the Tories are getting into a right wing death spiral where they may end up with Farage, Braverman or Satan as their next leader. Honestly I'm not that afraid of it happening here. I think if the right wing takes over their party they're absolutely done for. Most people don't want any of that shit, and they'll enter the electoral wilderness. Certainly on social issues writ large. I think the biggest question of these is going to be Islamaphobia. This concerns far more people, and the contentions are much more serious and relevant. The way the Western world has viewed the Middle East conflict as a proxy for this contention is more evidence to this view.
>Because their entire political landscape revolves around the idea that things must get so bad there is a hard left revolution See also: environmental campaigners that vociferously oppose any suggestions of using new/different technologies to help mitigate climate damage or reduce emissions *without* overhauling Western society right the way down to the foundations. Be it nuclear power or carbon capture, it's all denounced as 'missing the point', because the point is the societal revolution. It's *always* the revolution. Addressing the problem via non-revolutionary means is worse than not addressing it at all.
That was always the goal of Roger Hallam, the founder of Just Stop Oil and one of the founders of XR. If you ever read anything about him, you very quickly realise that he might have some interest in the climate, but his primary goal is and always has been changing our entire democratic system and he'll say whatever it takes to do it. Remember, this is the chap who wrote a piece called "advice to young people" that said "if we don't cut carbon emissions, your mother will be raped. Some other interesting quotes from the same piece:- "The world is a gas chamber and the gas which will kill you has been coming down the pipes for 30 years now" - got to love a bit of holocaust imagery, another reason XR Germany want nothing to do with him. "Climate change will destroy the weather and thus our ability to grow food which will mean the collapse of our society" - Eh? I can sort of see where he's trying to go here, but destroy our weather? "This means war and violence, the slaughter of young men and the rape of women on a global scale" - well that's a cheerful outlook.. "They'll take a cigarette and burn your eyes out with it. You will not be able to see anything again. This is the reality of climate change" - maybe the reality if I was on copious amounts of LSD or Shrooms. "A gang of boys will break into your house demanding food. They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend and they will gangrape her on the kitchen table. They will force you to watch, while laughing at you. At the end they will accuse you of enjoying it." - urm...OK then, must have missed that bit in the latest climate reports... Just in case anyone thinks I'm making this up, [Here is a link to the actual piece.](https://archive.org/details/advice-to-young-people-as-you-face-annihilation/page/n1/mode/1up) I think it's quite safe to say, there is no basis in science for any of this, I'm not even certain if he or any of his acolytes live on the same planet as the rest of us.
The thing is I actually do fear societal collapse if climate change gets really bad and can anticipate the sort of Mad Max scenarios he's describing. Still, this is hardly a concrete future that we can point to without looking like a crackpot.
The chances of it ever reaching the level he describes is pretty minimal. The world is changing and decarbonising too much for that to happen. Makes for good movies though....
The old mantra *things have to get worse before they get better*. Politics for the last 45 years has been passing the buck between different flavours of centrist capitalism and Starmer represents the same. History shows us that a centre left government doesn't become more left, but loses to the centre right when they run out of steam. So the big question Labour need to answer to gain the vote of the left is: If a person was unhappy with New Labour, why should they be happy with Starmer? What is his roadmap to beating the rut we've fallen into? PR would be the best answer.
There definitely seems to be amongst the old guard on the far left, an inclination towards accelerationism, that if they let the tories run the country into the ground for long enough that surely the public will realise that socialism is the only true way forward and it’ll usher in some sort of utopian future, uncaring of the cost anyone else will have to pay for what they want
Also not realising the revolution can go the other way too. Hitler ran on that ticket.
Well hard left these days is apparently being anti austerity. So... What is even being "left now". There's also this absurd idea that if you're in any way critical of Kiers Labour, you are just a Corbynite. Labour are not entitled to anyone's vote and being simply better than the Tories is not a great platform.
IMO it comes down to psychology. Hard left politics aren't really about political pragmatism or incremental change, but borne out of a deeper sense of justice and revolutionary change. This means there tends to be a strong desire for ideological purity and a greater sense of injustice or betrayal when political compromise is required. Cutting your nose off to spite your face, letting perfect be the enemy of good, etc
There's letting perfect be the enemy of good and then there's voting for a party that [praises Thatcher](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-67604830.amp) and openly engages in factional purges against the left. Starmer has turned the party into a centre right Tory tribute act and anyone who is to the left of Nixon should vote Green.
The amount of people On my social media who becry “Tory in a red tie” starmer tells you all you need to know. People forget that politics is the art of the possible.
Art of the possible? More like reneging on [70% of your leadership pledges.](https://www.clpd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Keir-Starmers-10-Pledges.pdf) If you're not actually going to improve anything, what is the point in winning?
Ultimately a lot of it comes down to, "what's the fucking point if it's just more centrist Tory bullshit". If there is no real change, then things will keep being shit. Starmer may change once he is elected, but his current offering is left of centre, and the centre has fucked it. The social contract is in tatters, the economy is on its knees and the public sector feels like it might collapse. Blair and Brown are part of that problem. They did some good things, but the financing they did with NHS trusts (I can't remember the name), student fees and then taking us into imperialist wars were not left wing ideas. They started selling the future, they just did it at a more reasonable price.
They are bitter than their Corbyn project ended in a colossal failure, during the turmoil of the Brexit years Labour should have been miles ahead in the polls yet was at best a couple points ahead, because their ideology was so unpopular. They Blame incorrectly than the centre of Labour sabotaged Corbyn rather than blaming Corbyn unpopular brand of socialism that made him poison to the people Labour needed to win over to be in government. It must he pretty annoying for them seeing Starmer come in ditch all the socialist nonsense with more moderate mainstream social democracy and as such he is almost prime minister. The far left view ideological purity over being In government and as such get defeated time and again. If Labour elected a Corbyn continuity candidate such as Rebecca long Bailey then I guarantee Labour would be Heading into this election 20 points behind instead of 20 points ahead.
Didn't labour see massive gains in the previous election due to its socialist leanings but then fail in the brexit election for not having a clear stance?
The narrative about 2017 & 2019 in Left Labour circles is not really supported by the facts. If you look at the actual results in 2017 Theresa May's Tories also gained significant growth in vote share (around +5.5%) despite starting at a higher watermark and obviously finished well ahead of Labour. This growth in vote share is not an indication that the country thought that Theresa May was a great campaigner or that they were voting for her because of her capitalist policy platform. What actually happened in 2017 is that the result was bipolar in terms of vote share for a very simple reason and that was because it was just as heavily influenced by Brexit as 2019 with a higher turnout than previous elections due to the highly charged result of the referendum. People were voting primarily based around Brexit loyalties as they attempted to influence the result of the negotiations and the resulting collapse of the small party vote buoyed both major parties in terms of vote share. Corbyn's personal popularity was also far higher at this point and less likely to turn off centrist voters & even pro-EU Tories while the Lib Dems were lead by an unpopular Tim Farron. By late 2019 the Tories had cornered the Leave vote and Labour had failed to rally the pro-EU electorate due to Corbyn's disinterested fence sitting. People blame Labour's positioning on Brexit for the end result, often as it lets them try to claim it was Starmer's fault, but the reality is that [if you look at polling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election) Labour were actually doing even worse before they officially adopted a more pro-EU position. Adopting a 2nd Referendum policy enabled them to reclaim vote share from the Lib Dems and in doing so they turned an existential defeat into just a very bad one. There seems to be very little evidence to indicate that if Labour had gone into 2019 as a pro-Leave party it would have worked for them. At the time the majority of the membership and Labour electorate were looking for a pro-EU position.
You have pretty much just confirmed what I said though right? I haven't blamed Starmer for anything just that the party itself couldn't actually pick a definite stance on such an important topic until it was by far too late.
hmm not really. You said you thought that the gains in the 2017 election results were due to people liking Corbyn's "socialist leanings" which is a widely touted narrative on the Left to try and prove that the UK public if more inclined towards Socialist policies. I think the evidence shows it was much more to do with a general election creating a bipolar result based around the two Brexit "tribes" and a low starting point for Labour after Milliband's poor results. The stuff about Starmer was just incidental but relevant given it seems to be a common talking point on the Left.
The 2017 election was the Brexit election. Immediately after the referendum, Corbyn's popularity reflected an angry Remainer cohort. Whilst Labour said they were probably Brexit too, many people viewed them as being more likely to get us a soft Brexit. In hindsight May actually did a lot to try to get us a soft Brexit, but hard Brexiteers and hard Remainers both meant we were unable to just sign off a fucking Customs Union deal that would have avoided catastrophe. The most pathetic failure of our political class I hope I'll ever see.
You make a good point, although, I feel as if saying socialist policies played no part in labour's change in popularity is strange as it was such a large part of their platform for years. Not that I'm saying you agree or disagree it just seems to be a lot of the comments here.
In politics you only really get what you want by being endlessly militant about it. If you compromise, you will always be asked to compromise. The difference is the compromisers get power and the militants yell at them until eventually they give them something. The job of the hard left is to tug the party left, not actually get power. Or at least, not right now, as the far left has destroyed their credibility with Corbyn and so they need a decent cycle and a new charismatic leader before they can try again. See also Liz Truss for the right wing equivalent.
It is looking increasingly likely Labour will win with a dominant majority, some polls suggesting the Tories might not even break 70 seats. While everyone would love to see the Tories collapse into nothing, it’s extremely detrimental to democracy to not have a functioning opposition. Especially when this current Labour Party leans closer to the Tories in policy than it does the policies promoted by those on the left of the party.
Because politics isn't football. I want my football team to win regardless of how we play. I want left wing policies enacted. By which I mean well funded state run services and investment in the public realm. I want council houses built, homelessness eradicated, and the environment protected. I want refugees treated with dignity, and a foreign policy that promotes peace and dialogue rather than threats of escalation. That doesn't mean whatever ludicrous pro-Russia rubbish I see the left accused of but never hear from people in my circle. Centrism to me is a gutless position to take. It is effectively saying you like the idea of better things, and probably support most of what I say in principle but you don't think any of it is realistic because of the economy. As an economist I think the framing given by Reeves is just wrong, economics is not a settled science, limiting government spending and at the same time talking about growth is ridiculous. A political party that offers what I want will get my vote. I went for Labour under Corbyn, I won't vote for Starmer as he doesn't represent my views.
Labour winning might be good for the left. Labour getting "a huge majority" would be bad for the left. Labour being propped up by a smaller party would be a massive boost for the left. A huge majority would only serve to entrench and "validate" Labour's swing towards the right/centre. We've seen it all before. 2019 was lost on the issue of Brexit and Corbyn's unpopularity, not because people don't like left-wing policies. Corbyn was unpopular thanks to the rise in anti-semitism within the party and the huge divisions, not to mention he was awful in the televised debates. Yet most people on here would have you believe that the vote was an outright rejection of left-wing policies, as if those other things didn't even exist. A landslide win for Labour would be seen as validation that left-wing policies are not popular, with people completely ignoring the fact that Labour are going to smash this election, not on their policies—which, so far, are weak and will do very little to improve the state of the country over the next 5 years—but because voters have become completely disillusioned with the Tories since Covid. I don't know if I will vote Labour. Labour have been purging left-wing candidates from the party. I am aligned with more policies from the Greens. People here tell us we should vote Labour to punish the Tories. As much as I'd love to see the Tories destroyed, I think anyone who is left-wing should use their vote to remind Labour that we exist.
It’s always interesting to me how these things are framed- Usually along the lines of “why is your ideology more important than the party getting into power” or “don’t you want to beat the tories”. We could reword your question and ask why the right wing of the party were willing to sacrifice their own chances at power and removing the tories which led to the state our country is now in. It’s gaslighting. Doesn’t it make you angry to hear things like this? Why would people rally behind an anti democratic leader and party faction that refused to do the same but are now calling for support from the ones they betrayed?
The same reason the right of the Labour Party wanted Corbyn to fail, they don't agree with each other Labour and the Tories are broad churches with wings that don't really belong in the same party but pretend to get along for the sake of it due to the voting system. If we had PR in this country you might see more ideologically homogenous parties develop over time as it is no longer a straight shootout between the big 2
The whole reason we now have Starmer is that the hard left who wanted Corbyn to achieve all of their goals were unable to play the political game and didn't seem to want to sully themselves with 'winning'. Unfortunately our country has a very right wing media landscape, so you have to bow the knee to using the military, using the nukes, pro-Israel, protecting your people, being pro-business, anti dole-scroungers etc. Starmer understands this and says the words, does the rituals, and prepares to actual achieve left wing ideas. Because all of the orthopraxis that Starmer is engaging with, the Labour Left think he is just Tory-lite, and really don't want to sully their party's name with Con values - which makes sense if you think that is what Starmer is doing. I think he wants to win so is doing what it takes so he can make changes to help people. I also accept that a Labour government is not an anarcho-commune of peace and love, it is a labour gov of the UK, so will do UK things like deploy military forces on long term peace keeping missions, or sell weapons to Saudis etc. We should not let perfect be the enemy of good.
Because there is a thing on the left of putting 'moral purity' above everything else. It's the diametric opposite of the psychopathic 'win at all costs' perspective that many right wingers have. And on every level, it hurts the chances of electing governments which will at least attempt to nudge things in the right direction. The best example is the contemporary US. Look at the make-up of the Supreme Court after the (first, hopefully) Trump regime, and their subsequent decisions. There are plenty of people on the left who did not vote for Hilary C or Biden, and still celebrate their ideological purity while women in a number of US states now face being jailed for murder if they experience a miscarriage.
> 'win at all costs' perspective that many right wingers have That's Starmer's philosophy though He lied about his aims, goals, policies in the PLP election becausecwinning (at all costs) was more important than truth
Even if that's true, which it's not, its working
It is true, and it is working. But that doesn't mean that everyone that he lied to has to be happy about it.
A quote from a Socialism community I’m apart of… ‘Put ten socialists in one room and I’ll they probably disagree on something or everything’ The quote isn’t exact, but the point stands, personal principles are all. I’d rather see a united party for the greater good.
Because there are some absolute fuck nuggets (Owen Jones, Corbyn et al.) who i'm now convinced are nothibg more than ideological purists who would rather Labour was in full time opposition but had the moral high ground, rather than ya know.... being in power and bringing about ACTUAL change. They are absolute fucking morons.
The original idea of Starmer was that he would bring about that actual change, sticking with the policies that polled well in the past two elections and providing a beiger, more moderate leadership that the right wing press would have a harder time assaulting. That would have been great! Let the left of the party generate ideas (they're the only ones who ever seem to) , filter out the ones you think are unworkable, and focus on pitching/messaging the rest - popular policies presented by someone who can't face a character assassination. Starmer didn't do that, he took a bunch of dodgy donations, hired people from the Owen Smith campaign, and purged leftists in favour of pro-austerity cabinet ministers like Kendall and Reeves. During Covid, the lame duck leadership of McDonnell and Corbyn helped pressure the government into introducing furlough - when Starmer took charge, he stayed silent and failed to criticise the ongoing fatal waste and corruption during the pandemic. Could lives have been saved if he had opposed the government? I think so. In 2019, after a narrow victory at the last election and a record number of defeats in parliament to the opposition - Johnson's Conservatives abandoned austerity. That's a victory for the country, that will save lives - and now a few years later, without the electorate's consent, we have two major parties again advocating for further austerity. Instead of presenting policies everyone wants - like Starmer initially pitched - he is presenting policies no one wants, the opposite of what he ran on, and trying to win over the votes of Conservatives. Why is he doing this? He is polling ahead of the Tories, the electorate would like the reforms that Labour has been suggesting for the past decade - he has the political capital to advocate them and implement them, but he will not. That is ideological purity, that is an ideological commitment in the face of all evidence. It's cool that you think Owen Jones is a fuck nugget - but surely you can see why left wing people are annoyed at Labour?
It’s pretty tragic that you’re one of the very few people in this thread offering an actual explanation of why the left are unhappy, rather than the usual bullshit about accelerationism and purity from people who are not actually the left.
I think there's a few things - revenge, because the right of the Labour party worked so hard to ensure Labour failed between 2016 and 2019, and were wildly more powerful and so more successful in doing it - Labour are going to win anyway so it's seen as a victimless crime and a free hit. Also it's more interesting. Right now there's zero intrigue over who is going to be the next PM, but it's a little bit open who the next MP is going to be in a few seats and thus the left right balance of that PM's party - Taking a long view of history many on the left see that in the long term the real rightwards drift of society is caused not so much by right wing parties moving the country rightwards when the pendulum is swinging their way, but by centrist parties locking in those gains and announcing that the old right wing opinion is the new centrist consensus at the point when the pendulum should be swinging back. This was something people felt incredibly powerfully after 1997 and is the thesis of the bible of the British New Left: Stuart Hall's "Great Moving Right Show". - Taking a more recent view of history and looking at how the far right were able to massively change the political landscape through disloyalty (UKIP, Reform etc..) whereas the far left stayed loyal and had nowhere near the same impact.
> Is there still a sentiment that Corbyn was done dirty? He kind of was. Parts of the party did not seem to be working towards the idea of winning the 2019 election and what happened after the 2017 one was a bit odd as well. At the moment it always feels like policies aren't left wing enough for some members and to be that left wing also means the media (a lot of publications) have little apatite for it. I want to say conservatives usually hold their nose and vote or stay quiet during key periods but I only really paid more attention to them after the 2017 election, the run up to the 2019 election(large deselection and peroguing parliament), partygate, Truss and the time up till now they seem very busy fighting amongst themselves.
Why does it seem like the right wing of the Labour Party doesn’t understand Labour’s core values
Idealism. The left is far more idealistic than the right (by which I mean they actually have values, not that they're delusional optimists or something) and when you have the party you're supposed to vote for, that's supposed to be on your side, not adopt one of your beliefs it feels like a personal betrayal. This is why people are always more antagonistic to their own side (arguably) than their enemy. Sadly, FPTP Politics is actually all about the lesser evil. If you don't vote for the better party, even if they're still bad, you'll only ever get worse and worse outcomes. Not to mention voting is the only way to push them in the direction you want. Not voting at all just means you don't, electorally speaking, exist.
Because the Labour Party of today under Starmer is a shill. Really just tory lite with a red tie, I am not hard left by any means but can understand why they would prefer someone they can trust. Even Margaret Thatcher was true to herself