Labour Party Set for Landslide Win in UK Election (nytimes.com) 278
Britain's Labour Party was projected on Thursday evening to win a landslide election victory, sweeping the Conservative Party out of power after 14 years, in a thundering anti-incumbent revolt that heralded a new era in British politics.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak accepted defeat Friday, and said he had called Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, to congratulate him.
The New York Times: Partial results, and an exit poll conducted for the BBC and two other broadcasters, indicated that Labour was on course to win around 405 of the 650 seats in the British House of Commons, versus 154 for the Conservatives. If the projections are confirmed, it would be the worst defeat for the Conservatives in the nearly 200-year history of the party, one that would raise questions about its future -- and even its very viability. Reform U.K., an insurgent, anti-immigration party, was projected to win 4 seats but a significant share of the vote, a robust performance that came at the expense of the Conservatives.
The exit poll, which accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections, confirmed the electorate was thoroughly fed up with the Conservatives after a turbulent era that spanned austerity, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, the serial scandals of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the ill-fated tax-cutting proposals of his successor, Liz Truss. While a Labour victory had long been predicted -- it held a double-digit polling lead over the Conservatives for more than 18 months -- the magnitude of the Tory defeat will reverberate through Britain for months, if not years. Further reading: Financial Times; BBC, and The Guardian.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak accepted defeat Friday, and said he had called Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, to congratulate him.
The New York Times: Partial results, and an exit poll conducted for the BBC and two other broadcasters, indicated that Labour was on course to win around 405 of the 650 seats in the British House of Commons, versus 154 for the Conservatives. If the projections are confirmed, it would be the worst defeat for the Conservatives in the nearly 200-year history of the party, one that would raise questions about its future -- and even its very viability. Reform U.K., an insurgent, anti-immigration party, was projected to win 4 seats but a significant share of the vote, a robust performance that came at the expense of the Conservatives.
The exit poll, which accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections, confirmed the electorate was thoroughly fed up with the Conservatives after a turbulent era that spanned austerity, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, the serial scandals of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the ill-fated tax-cutting proposals of his successor, Liz Truss. While a Labour victory had long been predicted -- it held a double-digit polling lead over the Conservatives for more than 18 months -- the magnitude of the Tory defeat will reverberate through Britain for months, if not years. Further reading: Financial Times; BBC, and The Guardian.
Not dead yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
From TFS:
If the projections are confirmed, it would be the worst defeat for the Conservatives in the nearly 200-year history of the party, one that would raise questions about its future -- and even its very viability.
Really? Other parties in other countries have fared far worse and have risen from the ashes to govern again. Take for example the Progressive Conservative party in Canada, after the Mulroney years. They went from forming the government to having only 2 seats in the House of Commons, and losing their official party status in that chamber. It took some years, some merging (with Reform IIRC) and some rebranding (to the (new) Conservative party) but they eventually formed a government led by Stephen Harper.
[Disclosure: I'm no big fan of conservatives. I'm just pointing out that their demise is unlikely.]
Re: Not dead yet? (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s a bit of a whataboutism. Itâ(TM)s also not very accurate: the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (PC) voted to dissolve itself in 2003. The Alliance party had about six times as many seats in parliament at the time, making any merger a takeover by them and the resultant party an Alliance child, not a reinvention of the PCs. They then happened to change their name to Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), which bears only similarity in name to the defunct PC party.
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yeah, Farage was talking about it because he was plotting exactly that kind of takeover.
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There's a big difference between parties of the right surviving, and the Conservatives surviving. The Progressive Conservatives have not survived as a political force in Canada in any meaningful sense. They were wiped out and the remnants subsumed. But of course, right-leaning political parties continued in Canada.
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on the national level you mean. there are several provincial level Progressive Conservative (PC) parties - not that the label means much, but those parties don't have the more radical Reform elements in control
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Yes, I mean on the national level. More generally, I'm saying it's rare but not unknown for a political party to cease to exist as a meaningful force in democracies around the world, and it appears to be happening more frequently in the last couple of decades too.
Very Like Canada (Score:2)
I suspect that the result will be similar in the UK: merger between the parties with a the resulting party have a lurch to the right co
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Kinda... yes the Farage ego party split the vote but it was only splittable to that degree because the Tories have fucked up so hard for so long.
The policies of austerity and Brexit are biting really reality hard now, and the liner it goes on the harder it is to ignore the decline. Truss figured the economy and Johnson epitomized the utter disregard for the public.
Farage tried before but didn't split the vote remotely to this extent.
Reform isn't going to disappear for a while. The country is in the shitter
Brexit failed. (Score:2)
Go crawling back to the EU, begging for forgiveness.
Actual Representation (Score:2)
US ppl take note.
UK has around 67-70 million ppl. It's 'house' has 650 seats. 1 Rep for ~100,000 people
US has 330 million and only 435 house seats. 1 Rep for ~750,000 people.
If you wonder why your US Rep generally doesn't listen to you...it's because they represent more people than some US States.
Re:Actual Representation (Score:4, Insightful)
It also helps that the voting system allows for voting of minor parties to represent people. The US has a bigger issue right now, and it's that neither party is actually any good and yet they are the only two options on the ballot that don't involve literally throwing out your vote.
Re:Actual Representation (Score:5, Informative)
Our system is first-past-the-post, which is probably the worst system in use in any major democracy except the US. It produces poor outcomes and makes it very hard for smaller parties to gain traction.
Our media is shit as well. Both the Greens and Reform got 4 seats, but Reform got 20x as much air time because their leader is a frog faced wanker. The only other smaller party that did well, the Lib Dems, spent the entire election campaign doing stunt after stunt just to get the cameras to look at them for a few seconds. Literal stunts, with their leader doing extreme sports and other nonsense.
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If UK had proportional representation like Europe does than Reform would have won 50+seats.
There is a reason the UKIP had more representation in the European parliament than in Westminster. EU elections use proportional representation.
So, NO, the Green party is not as relevant as the Reform party and YES, UK is full of xenophobic twats. One in 6 voted for Reform. That tells yo
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But how much better would the Greens do if we had PR and people felt that voting for them wasn't a vote wasted?
Reform only do well because of stupid voters who respond well to their populism and don't understand how FPTP works. Most potential Green voters probably do understand that voting Green only serves to make it easier for the Tories to win.
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In practice it doesn't work as well as you might hope. You rank your choices, say, from 1 to 8 in order of preference but in the majority of cases still end up with having to choose the least worst of the two major parties.
Here in Australia in my electorate, the candidate of the now ruling ALP got elected with 28.4% of the primary vote (and over 11,000 less than her opponent) - hardly a ringing endorsement just that in total, 52% couldn't stand the other party. (ALP and the Coalition still won 89% of the se
Things will still be tricky for the UK. (Score:2, Insightful)
Brexit was a disaster long coming, kicked off by Thatcher and her inane euro-bashing intended to distract from her neo-con agenda in leaving the workers of the industrial age out on their luck and little else. This labour victory is some solace, but the problems won't just vanish. Not only has the UK lost its access and influence with the European continent, it is also facing the same headwind that every other nation is facing: demographic tilt, ever more pressing need for a general eco-turnaround, dwindlin
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Thatcher did indulge in some Euro bashing, true, but she was also instrumental in constructing the Single Market. My dad was a small businessman Tory who was grateful to Thatcher for having new opportunities to win work in Germany and Austria based on exactly that.
The acid test that's coming (Score:2)
In my view, the biggest challenge the incoming government is going to have to face, is whose interests it chooses to serve -- young or old. By young, I actually mean the under 65s, ie the population where Labour commanded majority of support, as opposed to the over 65s, where they didn't, but where they focused efforts to win over as many switchers as they could. They can't serve both at all times, because the interests of each group massively diverge on housing, on infrastructure, on education, etc etc. So
Labour didn't win, the Conservatives lost (Score:5, Informative)
As proportions of the vote, the Labour vote barely shifted, and almost all of their gain was in Scotland. What gave them this massive majority in the Commons on the basis of less than 34% of the vote is the collapse of the Conservative vote as a party who has been in power too long finally ran out of ideas and time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ele... [bbc.co.uk]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ele... [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Labour didn't win, the Conservatives lost (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that's being too generous. The Tories didn't just run out of ideas, they botched it.
Brexit was a disaster. COVID killed over 230,000 people and crippled many more, many of the Tory voters. Their immigration policy was both a disaster and utterly inhumane and cruel.
And most of all, the wrecked the economy. Between the outright plundering and the utter incompetence of people like Liz Truss, who was selected by the party and not the electorate, they really made people suffer.
They also failed to deal with the rise of UKIP, sorry I mean Reform Ltd. They could never beat them as being far right racists and populists, it was the wrong response.
I just hope Labour understand this and make an effort to appeal to the people they abandoned now.
Re:Labour didn't win, the Conservatives lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the wrecking of public services and infrastructure, too! Literally everything broken: healthcare, justice, police, roads, rail, water, schools, universities, social care, local authorities, housing, they even fucked up the CfDs for renewables. I cannot think of a single public service or national infrastructure that's in better shape now than in 2010. Not one.
The Railways (Score:2)
A visit to Reading Station and a trip on the Elizabeth line will remind you that some things are a lot better than they were. And they've finally got rid of the Pacer trains whose persistence in the North was a long term reminder that the North was persistently ignored whilst the South got all the new toys. And actually my local hospital is expanding slowly but surely...
But yes, it's true that a lot of things have gone bad. What's hard is to accept that there are almost no counter examples out there of majo
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Don't forget partygate. There is and will likely remain for a long time a huge amount of deep seated bitterness from people saying their final farewell to loved ones over zoom while Johnson and co ignored their own rules and partied on.
It's also the kind of deeply personal insult which cuts cleanly across party lines.
Liz Truss,
And she lost her seat! PM since the last election lost her seat! Aaaaaaahahahahahahahaha.
I just hope Labour understand this and make an effort to appeal to the people they abandoned
First past the post vs proportional representation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:First past the post vs proportional representat (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had proportional representation people would have voted differently, so the numbers don't translate in the way that you think.
The Green Party also got 2 million. They don't get much news coverage because, unlike Farage, they put across a thoughtful and considered point of view; rather than being barnstorming and rude.
There hasn't been a move to the right, there has been a much wider spread. With PR we would have seen a lot more than that.
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Bingo. Had the Tories been elected in 2015 on the back of PR, Cameron wouldn't have needed to placate old twats' bigotry with Brexit and immigration xenophobia, because old twats wouldn't have been essential to winning the election. For the same reason, Labour would have been able to have a policy offer for people under 65 in this election, because again, old twats and their bigotry would have been much less important.
The Greens have no idea where to get money from (Score:2)
There was a spectacular car crash of an interview with a Green spokesperson on Radio 4. The interviewer shredded her over the fact that they had no coherent policy to raise the money to do their very expensive policies - so much so that she resorted to complaining that she'd come on to talk about a particular Green policy.
Unfortunately the British Greens are an avowedly left wing party, endorsing all sorts of fashionable issues like gender self identification and easy access for young teenagers to puberty b
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The Greens want to raise taxes.
That's a more coherent idea than what Labour have which is to fix shit without doing anything new.
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The Green Party in the UK has had some real clangers over the past few months. Like their candidate in the locals shouting Allahu Akbar:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne... [telegraph.co.uk]
They're still a fringe joke, on the other side of the horseshoe from Reform.
Labour landslide..... (Score:2)
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That analysis masks voter flows and the importance of efficiency in FPTP. Labour had a stark choice: offer policies to fire up the base, or win (or at least don't lose) the swing. They did the latter, which means that the base was disheartened and many stayed away, some switched to Green or the odd independent candidate, but that didn't matter because Labour could lose those votes without losing (many) seats, because they were in places where Labour had lots of votes to lose already (seats with a lot of the
Actually Reform Landslide (Score:2)
The actual story is that the Xenophobic twats who are the Conservative base could not stomach a non white PM and punished them by voting Reform.
Its Reform who has gone up by 12% while Conservatives have gone down by the corresponding 12%.
Is the UK border open now? (Score:2)
No more refugees waiting in Calais? Will the Jews be expelled? Are people like J K Rowling being rounded up? Will Britain resubmit to the rule of Brussels?
Productive forward movement (Score:2)
and not reversion to earlier times
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What are these "districts" you keep talking about? And what's a "local school board"? What's a "blue ribbon commission"? What are "school graduation rates"?
I'm not sure what language you're talking, but you're clearly not from the UK. Maybe learn something about the country before commenting on its politics?
Re:4 years - Measure the problems fixed after 4 ye (Score:4, Informative)
They political party has a super majority and should be put into law just about anything it wants.
For fuck's sake not this again. We've had a week of tories harping on about supermajorities.
There is no such thing as a supermajority in UK politics.
A government with a majority of one can pass whatever bill it chooses if none of its members rebel.
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yes, in a parliamentary system they are disciplined/incentivized to use restraint by the electorate. if there was democratic backsliding e.g. changing rules to favor one party it would be an issue because it would subvert this check (see Orban for example). unlike the US they can effectively legislate so courts aren't elevated
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>"There is no such thing as a supermajority in UK politics."
There is also no such thing as a conservative party, either (at least, not the one they call "the Conservative Party", which is barely a fraction of a blip more conservative than the Labor Party).
Re:4 years - Measure the problems fixed after 4 ye (Score:4, Informative)
We have a Labour party, not a Labor party. And the Labour party is substantially to the left of the Conservative party from the point of view of people who actually live here, particuiarly in respect of public services. This is blindingly obvious the minute you look even briefly at the incredible damage inflicted on practically all public services by the Tories, and compare it to what happened to public services under Labour. Maybe these things don't appear important to you as an American as a means of distinguishing a party of the left from a party of the right, but they matter enormously to Brits.
If you want to understand how a large majority of Brits think of the Tories and what they've done to the UK, watch this video:
https://www.thepoke.com/2024/0... [thepoke.com]
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I mean sure they are now, but Starmer has signed up to a bunch of Cameron style austerity, the Tory tax cuts and so on. The Tories swung super crazy as they self destructed, but Starmer's pretty conservative as these things go.
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I agree -- but the OP was claiming that the Tories weren't swivel-eyed right wingers, which is obviously bollocks, because they clearly were
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oh yeah absolute loonies, this lot.
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yes, although under a first-past-the-post system all parties tend to pander to central voter opinion, there are clear differences in ideology, the interests they are receptive to, etc. Party discipline can also give the false impression of moderation and uniformity in the caucus.
Removed the reason for whining (Score:2)
The party in power cannot 'conveniently' always blame a lack of progress on economic/social metrics and laws passed on the 'controlled opposition' minority party like in the past.
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Can you give an examples of when this has happened in the past? In my life time there have only been two governments without an outright majority. Minority parties have little or no impact on the passing laws.
Re:Govt won't have to buy off smaller parties (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you stop pronouncing with confident ignorance on the UK, please. We don't have pork barrel politics to speak of in the UK, and governments have been able to get stuff done when in coalition or a hung parliament. You understand absolutely fuck all about the UK's political system, and it really shows.
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That's not entirely true. For example, the decision to protect shipbuilding up in Scotland, at the expense of Portsmouth, was widely seen as a bribe for the Scottish electorate in the coming independence referendum. Not exactly port barrel in the way that the US has it, but not too dissimilar either.
As for the "supermajority", while it's true that governments can work with a majority of 1, in reality having a large majority changes the dynamic a lot. They can afford to upset many of their MPs and don't need
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Hmm. I think when an offer is made to an entire nation's electorate, it ceases to be pork barrel. Pork barrel really refers to an individual politician's ability to get government projects and thus money funnelled into their district (constituency, in theory, for the UK). I think the closest we get to pork barrel is actually that politicians can *stop* some stuff happening: A&E closures, new homes getting built (Tories will probably be even happier than Labour that Villiers is gone, because she didn't j
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Pork barrel really refers to an individual politician's ability to get government projects and thus money funnelled into their district
Well, by that definition we do have pork barrel politics. Tory MPs were able to get far more of the "Levelling Up" funds than opposition ones, and some of them even mentioned that fact in their campaign material.
Generally speaking, under the Tories, local Tory authorities and Tory held constituencies got more funding than Labour and Lib Dem ones. Taxpayer money was used as an incentive to vote Tory.
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Yes - I'd forgotten that this was a new corruption that the Tories introduced, you're quite right. The reason it wasn't quite pork barrel was that MPs didn't threaten to vote against their government if they didn't get the funds, as happens in the US. But the Tories certainly corrupted the process of funding allocations in an especially disgusting manner. They wrecked so much.
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Did you miss the story about Rishi Sunak telling an audience in Tunbridge Wells about how he'd diverted money from deprived areas to prosperous Tory ones like theirs?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-... [bbc.co.uk]
Such a shame that they still lost 28% of the vote share and the constituency was won by the Lib Dems.
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He will act as if he's personally elected king, and will continue 9 out of 10 Tory policies. Maybe if we're lucky he'll clean up the sewage in the rivers - but he'll certainly never try to claw back the profits from that.
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I fear you are right. Corbyn was the last chance for the UK, the rest is just managed decline.
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Corbyn was the last chance for the UK,
Corbyn was 50% great, 50% awful. He was not the great white hope.
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Corbyn would have been this century's Attlee. Big reforms in favour of the citizens that it's taken the right nearly a century to partly undo.
Too many of the electorate are hooked on pain.
Re:Govt won't have to buy off smaller parties (Score:4, Funny)
The anti-semitism stuff was mostly just to smear him. Labour did have an issue with it, but it also has issues with funding from Israel, and let's not forget that the other choice, the Tories, were supported by Russia, institutionally Islamophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and their leader was a habitual liar.
The whole Hamas thing is a great example. All wars end with negotiation, unless the intent is complete genocide/ethnic cleansing. Guess which ones Israel wants. But like with the situation in Ireland, and so many other conflicts, the only way to end it without total annihilation of one side is to sit down with the terrorists and commies and other too-awful-to-contemplates and make peace.
Honestly though, I expected better from you to give us the "they will never stop until they murder all Jews" thing. Come on, be serious.
His euroskepticism was the only major issue for me, but that second referendum would probably have kept us in the EU. As it was we got Boris' oven ready turd, so again it's impossible to say that Corbyn was the worse choice.
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Because Zionists say the same shit. If we choose to believe them then we need to eliminate both Hamas and Israel.
Even the Japanese and German surrenders came after a lot of talking between the two sides, and a lot of lives could have been saved if it has started earlier. Japan is the worst example of that, given they were trying to surrender and eventually the US accepted the terms they were asking for well before the atomic bombs were dropped.
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Good Lord, we dodged a bullet there. Thank goodness his politics and bigotry didn't appeal to most normal Britons.
Re: 4 years - Measure the problems fixed after 4 y (Score:2)
It'll take more than 4 years.
To increase the birth rates - make contraceptives expensive and internet/media boring.
Government mandated power outages 20:00 to 06:00 is an alternative.
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To increase the birth rates - make contraceptives expensive and internet/media boring.
Does not work that way. Iran for instance, which actually has those policies, has a fertility rate comparable to the U.S.: 1.91 children/woman vs. 1.84 children/woman. The only reason why Iran's population is still growing is the huge amount of young people having entered the fertile age in the last decades, which were born in the late 1970ies and early 1980ies. This bulge and the secondary bulge of the children of those people now coming of age and having children of their own cause the population grow.
P
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I'm of the impression that politics is largely irrelevant, serving just to create some bribing opportunities here and there for "smart players". Meanwhile the real forces which shape our world are vast and largely unknown. Not hidden deliberately, just not known.
Birth rates are a good example. There's lots of "obvious explanations" but they have no actionable value. My mum calls me selfish because I have no kids. Yet she only had one whilst her mother was one of eleven. This simple fact seems to elude her p
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The birth rate as of 2021 was 1.56 in the UK. Too many old people, not enough youngsters. Raise the birth rate or the country slowly dies.
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Or increase immigration! Old people voting for Brexit was like a shot to one's own foot. Who do they think pays for their state pension, healthcare and other benefits?
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Breentry.
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Labour will be fighting like rats in a sack in 12 months. It is a broad church and trying to keep the rabid hard left wingers in check will not be easy.
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The left wingers are largely outside the party now -- eg Corbyn -- and they are less than 10% of Labour MPs. Did this happen under Blair? No. And Blair was less ruthless with the left than Starmer has been.
Why is Slashdot full of these wildly ignorant political takes on the UK?
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Corbyn had a go at an election and it was disastrous for Labour. With him gone, more people felt comfortable voting Labour. Starmer has a much more stable party to work with.
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Exactly - totally agree. The "rabid left" is going to have absolutely fuck all influence over Labour policy. Frankly, I think the Greens and Reform are more likely to shape Labour priorities than Corbyn and, eg, Annaliese Midgley. (I don't mean Greens or Reform will directly shape, I mean they'll be more astute at applying political pressure that results in Labour shifting positions than left Labour MPs)
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Starmer's housing promises will require hard left measures to implement.
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I'm afraid you're going to have to spell out your reasoning here for me to engage on this point, because I don't see this at all
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"export to international markets"
Now that's funny. Ain't no fixing Brexit in 4 years.
I hope they can show other countries *cough* US *cough* that actually doing things for the *people* is a winning strategy and it more than pays for itself.
Re:4 years - Measure the problems fixed after 4 ye (Score:5, Insightful)
Brexit was the British version of "America First", and was about as successful and the American version will be. When America and Putin's stooge whine about MAGA, most of the rest of the World issues a collective sigh and mutters, "Not #*O&(*&%^ again, get over it." Putin, on the other hand, knows damn well it will be the end of America as an example of free democratic country and hence is all for his stooge.
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Polling shows that the British people consistently and by quite a wide margin want to undo Brexit. They view it as a mistake and want to get back some of the rights and prosperity.
Unfortunately Starmer has ruled it out, condemning us to another 5 years of of a crippled economy.
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This is nonsense. The EU would accept the government decision without any concerns, just as they did after the Brexit vote.
It is now within Starmers power to re-apply. He won't.
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>They political party has a super majority and should be put into law just about anything it wants.
In UK there is no "Super majority" Any party with 50%+1 memeber of pariament can do any law. Many other countries have rules where say 2/3 is needed to change important things.
But it is true that having more than half helps in that they can the ingone some idiots inside their own group if they need to.
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I don't think there will be much substantial improvement before the next election. The economy is in a really bad state, and Labour have already ruled out fixing the tax system to make it fairer. The Green New Deal seems to have been abandoned and we will be lucky to get a small fraction of it.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but the reality is that Starmer's Labour is Tory Lite and has wedded itself to failed Tory policies, just more competent.
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I cannot tell what Labour as a party stands for. I used to know but then Corbyn got booted and it was clear they weren't the Labour Party of old. Starmer claims there will be no rejection of Brexit, but I suspect after Britain found it couldn't really Brexit, that they will slowly re-engage with the EU. Rejecting your biggest trading partner isn't exactly a recipe for success. And the goal of establishing free trade agreements never really materialized except with small countries. There will be no free trad
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Starmer's biggest problem is that because he won't fix the tax system to make it fair, he both has no money and most people are stuck with a very high tax burden.
He needs to be honest and just say that most of us are going to have to pay for Tory mistakes and corruption, and it will take the better part of a decade minimum to get public spending up to decent levels. That's his choice, he won't tax the super wealthy or the big corporations.
I actually hope this is another one of his "lies", or more accurately
Re: 4 years - Measure the problems fixed after 4 y (Score:2)
The reality of the UK is that most public services are of poor quality, be it education or health care. Any middle-class family is aiming to not have to rely on the public system and use the private one instead.
What they're aiming to do is make the private system, which is already quite expensive, even less affordable, so that only the 1% can afford it. As for making the public services better, it seems the strategy is to make people have faith in it rather than actually invest resources to make it better.
M
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This probably isn't true but it captures a common sentiment among some Brits: "When Margaret Thatcher was asked what her greatest achievement had been she immediately replied, "Tony Blair."
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They political party has a super majority and should be put into law just about anything it wants.
Let's see after 4 years that they've 1) Fixed the economy, 2) drastically lowered pollution, 3) fixed the unemployment problems, 4) reigned in the excesses of wealth distribution, 5) shifted a large percent of the UK economy from pretend GDP (shuffling financial paper back and forth in London) to actual GDP (producing product for domestic use or export to international markets).
And corrected the structural problems which are causing the declining birth rate
1) Lack of jobs allowing 1 person the ability to provide for a spouse that may work part-time and care for children part time,
2) lack of treating both parents equally 50/50 before and after divorce with respect to child custody, finances, legal costs,
3) government programs which socialize the problems for half the population and expect the other half to only pay more taxes without any government programs to address structural issues
4) Equality imbalances in educational level, graduation rates, college attendance rates, college graduation rates
5) Equality imbalances in the demographics of primary school teachers, high school teachers and the negative affects on half of the students
6) Having a national conversation with actual action for equality instead of framing each and every program, campaign, political speech about securing votes by always promoting government programs for only half the population.
The Tories have had 14 years to lay waste to the UK and you expect Labour to fix all of that it in four years after UKIP and the Tories led the UK up out of the biggest contiguous market area on the planet? That is optimistic at best but realistically you are setting yourself up for a disappointment. The great British electorate in its infinite wisdom made the concisions decision let the Tory bull loose in the China shop and it will take more than four years to clean up the mess and re-stock the shop.
Actually 5 years (Score:2)
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They political party has a super majority and should be put into law just about anything it wants.
They DO NOT have a supermajority. There is NO SUCH THING as a supermajority in the British constitution. They have a strong majority, that's it. The supermajority thing is just made up Daily Mail fearmongering.
Let's see after 4 years that they've 1)
You think they can fix 14 years of slash and burn destruction in 5? That's simply not possible, no matter what laws they can pass.
And corrected the structural proble
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Inflation is already massive on food prices. 31% higher than three years ago. https://www.aljazeera.com/econ... [aljazeera.com]
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The takes just keep on getting more and more ignorant. Of all the things to accuse Starmer of, populism has to be the most ridiculous. His policies are milquetoast and centrist, not populist. And his economic policies are hawkish, not inflationary.
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I worry that Starmer's centre-right politics, which you rightly describe as "centrist", will only help the far right build support. We are stuck in a cycle of mediocre centrists not delivering, and the electorate being charmed by populists who drag us further to the right but inevitably break everything, so we vote for a centrist, and round and round.
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When was the last time we had mediocre centrists who didn't deliver? That's not an accurate description of the Blair government. They were centrists, but they weren't mediocre, and they delivered a substantial amount*. So not them. Cameroons cosplayed as centrists, but the nature of the austerity they actually implemented was exceptionally right wing from an economics / destruction of public services perspective, so not them either. And May and all who came after were not centrists and were much worse than
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Cameron was the mediocre centrist. You always get one in the end, because even the more successful centrists don't do enough to sell socialist policies and make it clear to voters that those are what are benefitting them.
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As I said above, I think Cameron wasn't really centrist, he just cosplayed it. All that elaborate Eton politeness, getting his chaps to stand when Blair left the chamber etc, the Big Society, etc -- I see all that as a mediocre centrist figleaf for the devastation of austerity, which was a nakedly right wing catastrophic economic approach that we never recovered from. I despise what Cameron did more than any of the rest, because he was the one who started the whole chain of horrors.
I agree that Labour's big
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That's certainly true, Cameron was really a right winger. But that's true of most centrists. Blair was a bit of an exception, and that was partly down to left wing people in his party. Unfortunately Starmer has purged most of them over the years.
Labour's housing policy will be interesting to watch. 1.5 million homes, but of course most of them will be rabbit hutch sized low quality crap, barely fit for human habitation, and massively overpriced. I'd love to be wrong but it's a good test of where bold action
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You won't see any privacy, technological or freedom measures from Labour either.
Re: news for nerds? (Score:2)
As you may have noticed, recent years the game here is to turn any topic into a political one as fast as possible.
Here, mortal members like us have obviously been scooped by the mods.
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Because the editors have become left wing zealots that want to push anything aligning with their bias.
Re:More Shit editing (Score:5, Insightful)
How the fuck is this remotely a Slashdot article ?
You tell me. It's only the 3rd one day and already on track to be come the most talked about article on this site. Maybe it is because politics of a significant country that shows a drastic and historic change in a country is "stuff that matters" and because quite clearly given the number of nerds commenting and discussing it seems to be "news for nerds".
You can just ... not click on it. There are plenty of things I see on Slashdot that don't interest me. It literally costs me nothing to *not* read that story.
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While many other European countries showed a resurgence of right wing parties in recent elections, the UK just chose to move to the left. Id say thats significant.
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There, there, maybe you could try the yellow pills next?