I would prefer a left wing PM that doesn't knock about with terrorists.Originally Posted by Boydy
I would prefer a left wing PM that doesn't knock about with terrorists.
Enjoy your right-wing PMs that pal around with war criminals.
One of the many reasons I also don't vote for them.
Why could he just not do this? What is wrong with them? It's really that simple.
Once they are shown up as the incompetent fools that they are, people will undoubtedly go back to the very competent people of [party not found].
I think running councils is bad for Reform because they will make a big noise about immigration and net zero, and then find that they can't do anything when the Home Office drops a thousand Afghans in their patch and net zero clauses will be marbled through everything the council does. If they had some balls they would do a Militant and refuse to implement all of the WOKE NONSENSE until Westminster compels them to, which would be fantastic coverage for them; but Nigel Farage doesn't actually want to rock the boat, so they won't.
It's not though. Corbyn was right on the Palestinian cause (proved even more right by events since he stopped being Labour leader like everything else). The whole "knocking about with terrorists" thing came from like one Palestinian memorial event where some guy who was in Hamas was in attendance.
You won't get a left-wing leader who doesn't have something "wrong" with them because the media (and the rest of the British establishment) will dig and dig and dig until they find something wrong. They do not want a left-wing government, it threatens their interests too much. That's why Starmer got such an easy ride in the press in the run-up to last year's election, because he was a safe Labour option for capital. Now he's tarnished the brand enough already, we'll not have any risk of another Labour government for at least a decade.
The only way to get anything vaguely left-wing now is to burn it all down.
Remember when the press were just constantly camped out at the front of his house? No other leader of any party gets that treatment. I couldn't tell you what the front of any of the current leaders' houses look like but we saw Corbyn's all the fucking time.
Just need to find our own Anthony Albanese.
Never thought I'd say that ten years ago.
Last time I checked Palestine wasn't part of Great Britain.
The idea that modern media is against the left is victim complex at its finest. They will definitely 'dig and dig' to find something wrong, but they will do that with anyone; that is their business model. The difference is that right wingers just lol it off since no one expects them to be good people anyway, while left-wingers spend so much time looking down on everyone with their holier than thou attitude that whenever anything comes up, they are completely broken.
Funnily enough, it is almost exactly backwards in most of Latin America.
I swear the press has done that for as long as I can remember. Not just on left-wingers but whoever tends to be in power. Running names through the muck is simply something they love to do. I presume it sells papers and clicks. Corbyn took a ton of unnecessary shit, though. If it wasn't the anti-semitism accusations, it was his crackpot brother being in the papers.
EDIT: Pepe's on the ball.
I don't think you realise how incestuous the media and politicians (and the rest of the upper classes) are in the UK.
Whilst there is a degree of victim complex, the weight of the media / lobbyists / opinion formers in each direction is not at all even. I suppose you could argue that Starmer et al are a sort of nefarious infiltrators on the left akin to how the right has captured many of the aforementioned 'institutions' through tactical means, but then they just seem to end up going in a similar direction to the other side on many issues which makes you wonder if they aren't essentially beholden in the same way. Appreciate that thought probably doesn't make a whole heap of sense but sod trying to make it clearer.
Did we get any dirt on Starmer at all before the 2024 election? Did he ever even face any difficult or awkward questions? He was the estbalishment's boy and he was basically fucking coronated.
As a man without any particular ideology / personality is there even any dirt on Starmer? Seems a classic believes in nothing but his own advancement type, as has been evidenced from before he even entered politics.
He played the game. What's wrong with that? Like I said, be serious. If you want really to make a difference don't go to Palestinian funerals lol. That simple.
I think they will only publicise shit about people that isn't likely to blow up in their own faces. There are various suggestions floating around about Starmer's personal life, but you don't want to be probing too far into beards or illegitimate children because most of the political-media class are likely at it (see also: people making things up on their CV). Most people haven't palled around with Hamas at some point, so they were on safer ground going after Wor Jezza.
He loves taking loads of free shit even before he was PM. He supposedly ran over a deliveroo rider and was allegedly having an affair too.
In the run up to the election there was very little in the way of policy and that was barely questioned. Whereas Corbyn and McDonnell's fully costed manifesto got laughed with "broadband communism" and "would you nationalise sausages?".
That said we had rolling crisis coverage on Boris Johnson having some cake at work, so there is an argument that they are just fully deranged and should be ignored.
I enjoyed the broadband communism stuff.
"Do you want a future with rubbish, slow internet that never works???"
It is always better to not have a plan. If you have a plan, people will nitpick it and question every single line. If you just say "we will create jobs and reduce inequality" or whatever, well, what is there to criticize?
I believe in fairness.
*"Fairness" leads to most inequitable outcome*
Apparently Nige has copy pasted Trump's policies in his victory speech about DEI and working from home, how they will end it all etc but that's not in their remit lol
We always seem to be out of step with the world in political terms.
Everywhere else [Canada, Australia] affiliation to Trump has been electoral poison overturning previous perceptions about how elections would go. Just blame low turnout and / or only mentals voting in local elections.
Trump will be gone by 2029 as well.
Well, hopefully.
Hmm!
Reform voters might want that, as Brexit voters most likely did, but Reform don't advocate for those things and if they did they would cease to exist fairly promptly. I guess that is why an established party feels it is unable to try to tap into those sentiments.
Why would they cease to exist? Farage was calling for the nationalisation of British steel the other week before Labour actually did it. It won't be hard to outflank Labour to the left on economics at the next election if Labour don't change from their current approach.
An established party has to try to tap into thos sentiments though. Labour has to anyway. They can bang the immigration and small boats drum all they want but the proper hardcore Reform/UKIP/Brexit voters (I mean over the past decade now) aren't going to believe them. So they need to start delivering on economic matters and actually improve people's lives if they want to stand any chance of winning. They don't though. They were put in charge to ensure no leftist Labour government and they'll retire to their corporate directorships afterwards.
The markets.
No they want rid of brown people. That's it.
I agree, but your final point shows why they don't, and why whoever gets in at the next election most likely won't either. Money talks. The contrary probably requires an actual revolution which isn't going to come from within the parliamentary system.
'The Markets' are happy for us to spend countless billions on complete shite and foreigners, so the state could easily nationalise strategic industries if it had a plan to run them effectively in pursuit of economic growth. They shat the bed for Liz Truss because her useless party immediately made it known that they would block every pro-growth reform.
The markets (as the sum total of big business interests) will be happy to do anything that brings cheap labour; anything that puts cheap labour at risk will cause them to shit the bed. Both the Truss position and any kind of left wing alternative can be filed under that heading.
So you would either need politicians with the balls to ride out the markets shitting the bed (even D Trump has failed this test) or you would need some kind of outside shock.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 04-05-2025 at 12:08 PM.
Sigh.
I mean, it's clear some of their candidates think that way.
Maybe, but it isn't the MO of their party, so what should really be happening is an interrogation of that, but instead we still have "lol racists", which has been proven time and time again to be a useless weapon against stopping something.
Not a racist party but something about the rhetoric keeps bringing racists to the party? Hmmmmm ....
Lol ok go and ask your average reform voter if they care about leftist economics.
I think what he's getting at is that calling a racist, a racist, isn't going to accomplish anything. They know they are, or are too stupid to realise it. Which is the trap often fallen into. There is for some reason an expectation that going down that avenue will get them to change their minds. If anything you annoy them more and push them further away.
You instead need to find something else you can share a common ground with. Take the last general election. I would wager a lot of these Reform defectors are people who voted Labour in the GE because they thought they would be better off. They see an unwillingness to tax anyone but the poor, are now arguably worse off and get to see headlines about them cutting money to the old people.
They wont vote Conservative because why would you this soon after their own shitshow, so they pick the next viable candidate.
Where else are they going to go? We have racist people in England and (as with every single other country in the World) we always will. As long as they're dealt with (which they'll have to be if Reform want to get anywhere seriously) then that's the way it should be handled.
We'll find out at the next general election. One thing is for sure there is no chance any political party at that election is winning a majority solely with policies that begin and end with small boats.
It also depends on ones definition of racism. Clearly thinking it's a bad idea to let nearly 1m people in annually on a net basis is not racist, but many others would think it is.
Reform probably want to stop leading their literature with that then. All three of the ones I received had that front and centre.
Yep, they absolutely do need to stop that - at this stage it's a moronic strategy.
Any benefits to big business are at this point massively out-weighed by the costs to the nation state, and Truss was liberal on immigration, so this is not a rational cost/benefit analysis on the part of anybody lending the government money.
That's so dumb.
But is absolutely what happens. How so many people can't see this is almost beyond me.
Interesting how a couple of the people in this thread make exceptions for the poles.
Talksport making Alan Brazil work a side hustle? This economy really is the pits.
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