Tag Archives: policies

Where will left-wing voters go, now that Keir Starmer has joined the Conservatives?

Tricky times: his right-wing policies mean he is unlikely to be able to form a government on his own – but can Keir Starmer be persuaded to turn left AFTER an election, in alliance with anti-Tory parties?

After Keir Starmer’s announcement that he doesn’t mind if people accuse him of being a Conservative, will voters abandon his version of the Labour Party in search of a new hope?

Starmer’s gamble – and perhaps his fatal flaw – is his belief that socialist, or at least left-wing, voters simply don’t have anywhere to go other than his neoliberal, right-wing party if they want to get the Tories out of office.

Novara Media‘s Aaron Bastani, writing in The Post, reckons he is mistaken:

from the embers of Corbynism, and a seeming ambivalence towards Starmer, an outline for the second half of the 2020s starts to emerge. In it, the Tories collapse — in the Red Wall to Labour and across their own heartlands to the resurgent Liberal Democrats — while the Greens emerge as a serious party across much of England.

I think Bastani himself is mistaken to put any faith in the Lib Dems. Too many of us remember their Coalition with a Conservative Party that could not win a Parliamentary majority on its own in 2010, ushering in the current age of austerity, privatisation, wage suppression and price inflation.

But his vision of a Labour government with little or no Parliamentary majority may still come true, albeit possibly with Independent MPs who Starmer ejected from Labour taking the place of the LDs.

Either way, with Starmer unlikely to win an election outright because his policies are too unpopular, he will be vulnerable to influence from the parties whose support he’ll need if he’s to pass any legislative programme at all.

He’ll have to do some horse-trading, and this means allowing some legislation that the other parties want. This creates an opening to bring in proportional representation again – not via a referendum in which the gullible may be tricked with lies, but by direct legislation. And why not? I don’t recall being given a choice about the voting system in the Welsh Assembly.

As for other policies, it depends how the new Parliament is composed. If the Liberal Democrats gain a significant number of seats, then it may be business as usual for the right-wing Establishment as, apart from a few cosmetic differences, a Lab-Lib coalition or confidence and supply arrangement will be little different from the current Conservative government.

But if left-wing, former Labour representatives gain a serious foothold, then the door may be opened for policies such as re-nationalisation of public utilities. Bastani indicates that Conservative voters want to see the Royal Mail re-nationalised anyway – but if it’s not a Labour manifesto commitment, it won’t earn Starmer any support.

So I reckon it will be for left-wing MPs to sort out with StarmerLabour after the election – if they get the chance.

Then again, Bastani reckons there will be huge pressure on Labour MPs and candidates – before the election – to address issues like the housing crisis.

But how are we supposed to do that?

MPs are easy to contact – they have to carry out regular “surgeries” that are open to the public and that’s how they learn what their voters want. Have you ever been to one? The alternatives are opinion polls, which are generally carried out on a national scale and may not represent what your constituency needs, or the ideas of those who spread their opinions across the letter columns of newspapers.

Representatives of other parties in your constituency are harder to find – or influence. Some may have local offices through which they may be contacted; others may have to be sought via their national headquarters.

But how can you guarantee to influence your party of choice? Labour’s attitude lately is to ignore anybody who isn’t Keir Starmer – and to accuse those who put forward radical alternatives to current party police.

It seems you are unsafe, wherever you go.

This Writer’s advice would be for anyone who is interested in their future – or indeed, in having any future at all – to contact as many of the established parties as possible, to discover their current policy platform.

If none of them conform with what you want – and you should make yourself expressly plain on that – then it will be time to ask someone to stand as an independent, if nobody has already come forward.

Whatever you choose to do, there is a long way to go – especially if you choose to do nothing at all.

And remember:

There is no guarantee that Starmer won’t simply ally Labour with the Conservatives; his lust for power really does seem to be that strong. What will you do then?


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The Labour Party has started to fragment – and it’s easy to understand why

Sold down the red river: once-loyal Labour members are throwing away their badges in disgust at Keir Starmer’s abandonment of traditional party values.

The day after former/expelled Labour councillors, standing as Independents, won back their council seats in elections across the UK, against their former colleagues, this happened:

For those who can’t read the lettering in image files, part of the resignation letter states:

“Our views are not radical: surely our party shold look after the interests of working people and the vulnerable, rather than court big business. Public utilities should be publicly owned. The NHS should remain publicly funded, publicly-run and free at the point of use.

“But the Labour Party has drifted far from these principles towards a pro-Establishment position that no longer represents the values, aspirations and dreams we had of a massively transformed society in which everyone would have the opportunity to to a fulfilling life in a peaceful and fairer world.”

You can understand exactly why the group now calling itself the Mid Sussex Left has quit Labour by listening to part of what Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said to Sky‘s Sophy Ridge on Sunday morning (May 7).  I’ve retained the tweet by “Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush” because the opinion it puts forward is valid:

“You don’t go into a general election making promises you can’t keep,” said Streeting. But that’s not quite the issue – it’s the fact that his party leader, Keir Starmer, continually makes promises he has no intention of keeping.

His claim about the public finances is meaningless. Any UK government can do anything it wants, and magic up the money for it by getting the Bank of England to create it. That’s how all UK money is created, by the way. There is a limiting factor in inflation, but the answer to that is taxation and a Labour government should be redistributive – in other words it would tax the rich more than the poor.

So with Starmer’s pledge to end tuition fees, which he ditched last week, we see that there is no financial limitation stopping him from doing it. Just as there is no financial limitation stopping him from doing any of the other leadership election pledges he has since abandoned.

We see no indication from Streeting that his boss Starmer would do any of these things and must conclude that they simply aren’t priorities of these people; their interests lie elsewhere.

Streeting goes on to lie – or at least tell falsehoods about the platform on which Starmer stood for the Labour leadership. Getting Labour electable again after the 2019 defeat might have been a background aim, but it wasn’t one of his 10 pledges.

And is Labour electable again? Well…

I’m sure you take the point. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was more electable than it is under Keir Starmer – until the people who are now Starmer’s supporters were trying to undermine him. And now Starmer and his cronies can’t get near the same level.

No wonder the principled politicians are leaving.


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Kwarteng is in a hole – and he’s STILL digging out unpopular policies!

Amazing.

Having realised his decision to cut the 45p tax rate was unpopular, Kwasi Kwarteng has reversed it (alongside his prime minister, Liz Truss). He will also bring forward his budget from November 23 to this month, to address concerns that it is unfunded and unviable.

But then he ruined it all by announcing new policies that are going to send voters running to other parties. They include:

£18 billion of cuts to public services – the amount that would be raised by a rise in Corporation Tax – and this is just the start.

A real-terms cut in benefits (yet to be announced but understood to be on the way).

And he’s still:

Removing the cap on bankers’ bonuses.

Cancelling the rise in Corporation Tax.

Here’s more in-depth information:

Bear in mind what Phil Moorhouse says about the reason the Tories shaft poor people: because they don’t vote in great enough numbers to harm Conservative electoral chances. It’s only when their cruelty seems likely to affect middle-class voters (like when many of them claimed Universal Credit during Covid-19 lockdown) that they make political – not economic – decisions that are intended to placate those voters.

This is the reason Tory MPs are developing a social conscience in the face of Truss’s – and Kwarteng’s – policies; they don’t want to upset their voters.

So if you’re a benefit claimant who has been shafted by Kwarteng and his bandits time and again – but you don’t vote – I have to ask: why do you have such a death wish?

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Culture legislation review prompts question: was Dorries allowed to do whatever she wanted?

Michelle Donelan: this is the only image of her that This Writer could find, in which she didn’t have an enormous, daft grin all over her face.

New Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan is reviewing plans by her forerunner Nadine Dorries to privatise Channel 4 and scrap the BBC licence fee, and also the proposed Online Harms Bill.

Doesn’t this suggest that those plans were not widely supported by the Tory Party and that Dorries was put at the top of that department by Boris Johnson to do nothing more than distract attention away from him?

Also being revisited are provisions around “legal but harmful” speech in the Online Harms legislation.

The review of Channel 4 comes amid criticisms that privatising the channel would harm the future of many TV production companies at a time when new prime minister Liz Truss wants to create growth. The two policies would therefore appear to contradict each other.

With the BBC, Ms Donelan has admitted being sceptical about the viability of the licence fee. But she has said that coverage of the Queen’s funeral was excellent – and the kind of thing that streaming services could not provide.

Source: Ministers to review Channel 4 privatisation and scrapping of BBC licence fee

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Will Liz Truss’s new policies appeal to target voters? Probably not!

The bank holiday weekend may be over, but this article is being produced in the period before everybody goes back to work – so I’m still putting up material that has interested me – and I hope it interests you. Make of it what you will:

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Truss in a rush to get policies out before Parliament closes for conference season

Liz Truss: will her performance this week set the benchmarks for everything we can expect from her in the future?

After a week trailing King Charles around the UK like a lost puppy, Liz Truss is going to have to show whether she has prime ministerial chops (whatever that means) – and fast.

Parliament will be open for four days this week – before going back into recess for the conference season.

But in that time, it seems, Truss will want to rush out a support package to help businesses cope with rising energy prices, a statement on possibly cutting waiting times for National Health Service treatment and her much promised tax cuts to try to spur growth.

She will also meet US President Joe Biden at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday after meeting other leaders who had travelled to take part in the queen’s funeral.

This is the meeting that was allegedly delayed because of an investigation into whether Truss’s chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, was involved in bribery and corruption in a recent Puerto Rican election.

And her fiscal statement, or mini budget, is expected to be delivered by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on Friday, when he is expected to scrap an increase in national insurance contributions and freeze the UK’s already historically-low corporation tax.

Kwarteng will also give an estimated cost for the energy package, but it will be up to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to offer the detail. He may also officially announce the end to caps on bankers’ bonuses, that was trailed last week.

The fiscal statement will follow Thursday’s decision by the Bank of England on whether to raise interest rates to fight inflation – seemingly moving in an opposing direction to Kwarteng, whose tax cuts could stoke prices.

And then there will be another long break for the party conferences. Will Truss use it to prepare for what threatens to be a gruelling Parliamentary season to come? We’ll be able to draw our conclusions from her performance over the next few days.

Source: Truss faces whirlwind week as politics resumes after queen’s funeral

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Liz Truss: extreme neoliberal, anti-Labour, anti-environmentalist – and populist

New Tory prime minister Liz Truss is nothing more than a piece of theatre, according to Guardian columnist George Monbiot in this Democracy Now! interview.

He says her every utterance is carefully rehearsed in order to say only what she thinks is popular – and the same goes for her policies; she adopts whatever policy she thinks will find favour with the audience she’s with.

The audience she has been with over the summer has been the Conservative Party membership – a grossly unrepresentative and tiny group of UK people.

In pandering to these people, she has supported extreme neoliberal policies – tax cuts for the rich, more austerity, more privatisation if possible, and all when the exact opposite is needed.

Watch:

Her second week in power is about to begin.

Feel free to check Mr Monbiot’s predictions against what Truss does.

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Will the policies of Liz Truss sink the Tories for good? [VIDEO]

Liz Truss: her policies are likely to fail and the electorate are likely to hate her in less than a year. What then?

Here’s some good commentary, courtesy of A Different Bias, of which This Writer had not heard previously.

Skip to 1:11 in (past the stuff about liking and subscribing to the channel), and we’re into a discussion of the most popular policies of the Johnson half-ministry: all of them involving massive state intervention; most of them being lies.

But the Tories are about cutting state intervention, which isn’t popular.

At the moment, all eyes and ears are on whether Truss will support a policy of freezing energy bills, in line with a plan put forward by Ovo Energy last week, and also the Labour Party. It seems likely that Truss’s plan will cost us all in the long term (effectively we take out loans from the energy companies and pay them back on top of our bills later) while also costing four times as much as Labour’s, so Keir Starmer will be able to say that she stole his policy and did it badly.

If that happens, she’ll be extremely unpopular and so will the Tories.

Her MPs won’t be happy, for reasons laid out in the video. What will they do?

Boris Johnson has already hinted that he might come back, with his reference to Cincinnatus, a Roman general who quit to become a farmer, then returned to his former role again.

Will the Tories really accept him back into their bosom after the nightmare of the last three years?

And will he even be able to come back, if the Privileges Committee inquiry into Partygate finds he should be thrown out of Parliament?

Here’s the clip:

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Tory Britain: we can’t afford to eat every day and we’re setting fire to our homes, trying to keep warm

Secret smile: Boris Johnson probably thinks it is very funny that his policies have made more than two million people unable to afford to eat every day, and that some people have set fire to their homes while trying to heat them by burning timber indoors.

You may wish to bookmark this article so you can send it to anyone who tries to tell you voting Conservative is a good idea.

Because more than 12 years of Conservative government has laid the once-great United Kingdom lower than it has been in decades – possibly more than a century.

More than two million people – one in every seven adults – can no longer afford to eat food every day:

More than 2 million adults in the UK have gone without food for a whole day over the past month because they cannot afford to eat

The latest survey of the nation’s food intake shows a 57% jump in the proportion of households cutting back on food or skipping meals over the first three months of this year, with one in seven adults (7.3 million) estimated to be food-insecure, up from 4.7 million in January.

And fire brigades are now overworked dealing with blazes in houses where people started burning timber in open fires because they could not afford the cost of central heating any more:

A man in south-west London set fire to his property by burning timber in his living room to keep warm.

The man was trying to avoid putting on the central heating in his home, fire investigators said.

Fuel poverty campaigners said the incident – one of at least 100 involving open fires, log burners and heaters in the capital in the last few months – laid bare “the harsh and dangerous reality of the cost-of-living crisis”.

Some might say that they don’t care; these incidents involve other people. It’s very easy to throw shade on others by saying they are unable to keep their finances in order.

But the Tory cost-of-living crisis affects us all.

Food costs more because of Brexit-related supply issues; housing costs more because the banks have increased interest rates, meaning mortgages and rents are going up; heating costs more because of the shortage of gas created last winter and accelerated by the Russia-Ukraine war; we are paying more tax to the Tory government than any UK population in more than 40 years.

Only people who are extremely rich can afford to blame others for being unable to stay warm or feed themselves in these circumstances. If you’re on a normal wage, you’ll feel the pinch soon enough.

And it’s all due to Conservative economic incompetence – sold to you with a lie that they knew what they were doing.

Or was it a lie? How much worse would you find it if this enforced starvation and these house fires were intended to happen by Boris Johnson and his party?

Source: More than 2m adults in UK cannot afford to eat every day, survey finds | Food poverty | The Guardian

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If a party won’t do what you want, why would you vote for it?

He couldn’t care less about you: Starmer welcomed heckles at his Labour conference speech because he wanted to humiliate left-wingers by claiming they don’t matter to him. He thinks they have no choice but to vote for his RIGHT-wing policies. But that would be an act of self-harm. We need to teach him that he is badly mistaken.

Labour has just suffered a heavy by-election defeat.

In the Newark and Sherwood by-election, Labour dropped from first to third:

Here’s a charitable commentary on that:

There is a simple explanation for this precipitous fall: people don’t like Keir Starmer and – more importantly – they don’t like his policies.

We know from opinion polls that a majority of the UK public want our public utilities and railways re-nationalised and private businesses removed from the National Health Service, along with a swathe of other socialist policies.

More than 70 per cent of the population support these changes – but both the Tory government and Starmer’s Labour “opposition” are telling you that you can’t have them.

They demand that, in elections, you support the policies that they want to force on you, whether you want them or not.

Why should you?

The answer is easy: the party leaders assume that you are naturally tribal. If you were brought up among Labour supporters, you’ll vote Labour no matter what daft right-wing policies Starmer foists on you. Similarly, if you were brought up among Conservatives, the assumption is that you’ll vote Tory.

They want you to vote against your interests, by lying to you that you don’t have any other choice.

Of course you have another choice: You don’t have to vote for either of them.

In fact, voting for Labour under Starmer would be a vote against the very policies that (according to the polls) you want!

I read an article in the Morning Star that explains the situation:

If Starmer does well at the next election, it will now explicitly be on the basis of his gratuitous and open repudiation of socialist values and principles.

Look at the Green New Deal, housing, Palestine or workers’ rights: no sooner had members passed policy at this conference than a shadow front bench minister was brought forward to renounce the policy and insist that it was not going to make the next manifesto.

The contempt for members, their values and the commitment to socialism under former leader Jeremy Corbyn was made clear in repeated public statements from the front bench, as well as at length in Starmer’s speech.

It further explains:

Is repudiating our entire tradition, our entire worldview and weakening our cause for decades, the price we are willing to pay for a slim (practically non-existent) chance of ending that, in favour of Starmer’s brand of washed-out liberal elitism?

The extinction of socialism from mainstream British politics would have far greater long-term effects on the lives and living conditions of working-class people than another Tory term. It would be a defeat for decency in politics, a defeat for morality, truth and reason.

And it says:

Success for Labour in the present conditions would be detrimental to the development of a truly progressive political agenda, and the advancement of our cause.

Whether you remain a member of Labour or not, unless you have particular mitigating local circumstances (such as a properly socialist local candidate running for Labour) then Labour is currently asking you to vote for the destruction of everything you believe in.

The people making this demand are well aware of how humiliating this is — and how depressing. They are also aware that a socialist movement cannot ever thrive if it is not proud of itself, dynamic and confident. This is yet another intended humiliation to put our ideas and principles back in the box.

Don’t do what you are being asked to do. Don’t vote to trash your principles or our hopes for a better world.

The people of Newark and Sherwood didn’t vote to trash their principles – and most of them are unlikely to have read the Morning Star piece.

This Writer feels sure that Thursday’s result is not unique; Labour is losing ground across the UK because Starmer’s policies are rubbish.

There is a dilemma for party members, who are not allowed to campaign against the party or show support for any other political organisation.

But that doesn’t mean you have to campaign for Starmer’s Labour. And it doesn’t mean you have to vote for policies that would harm you, either.

Starmer and his right-wing headbangers are trying to gaslight you into thinking there is no alternative to them.

They are wrong.

But it’s up to all of us to explain that to them.

Source: Should socialists vote Labour under Starmer? | Morning Star

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