Reminder that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is not ‘the media’. It’s a non-governmental public body created by a Labour government in 2006 to promote and enforce equality legislation introduced by said Labour government.

I mean, is it? Under his leadership the Labour Party broke the law in relation to racism within the party - that was the finding of the independent Equalities and Human Rights Commission investigation. It found that on Corbyn’s watch, the culture of the Labour Party ‘at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it’. He was the leader, he is accountable. That was his doing.

He then chose to put out a statement rejecting this and dismissing the evidence of racism suffered by Labour members as exaggerated - as a result of which he was suspended. That statement was his doing too.

And now he has chosen to stand against the Labour candidate in an election - this choice was also his doing.

So which part of this is ‘their doing’?

lily-livered

Hoist the mainsail and shiver me timbers, are they joining the Pirate Party?

I don’t think Starmer is stupid but I think Labour’s large polling lead has - paradoxically - encouraged him to be very politically timid, to the detriment of his party and the country.

Broadly speaking the Labour leadership seems to be acting as if, if literally nothing changes between now and election day, then Labour will win a landslide. That means no genuine big new policy announcements, because any policy change is seen as a roll of the dice that could change the polling status quo. Rejoining the single market whilst staying outside the EU could be a popular policy - polling shows that even Labour Leave voters support it by a 53% to 31% margin - and would give an incoming Labour government an actual policy option to help turn around the economy, but Starmer’s caution means forgoing this in favour of saying literally nothing novel. The Labour leadership think any change is a risk, and why take a risk when you’re already sitting on a polling lead.

In general I’m favourable towards Starmer, and certainly in comparison to what came immediately before him. But on several issues - Europe, electoral reform, Gaza/Israel - he’s adopting bad cautious positions to protect the enormous polling lead over the Tories he’s stumbled into. These are going to end up doing him more harm than good in the long run.

I was replying to you (you were saying Starmer is staying quiet because he needs Brexit voters in the North).

I’m saying that if that’s the case, he’s thinking of the Brexit voters of 2016, not what these people think about things in 2024.

The world has moved on from the divisions of 2016. The idea that Brexit was a bad idea is now pretty common outside the political bubble. Even among Leave voters, few think Brexit has been a success.

The economic reality of what Britain outside the EU looks like and the global geopolitical realignment that has happened since that day in 2016 - Russia’s warmongering in our European neighbourhood and the very real prospect of a future Republican president (if not Trump this November, then someone else 4 or 8 years later) abandoning NATO - obviously should lead (and is leading) to people who voted for Brexit rethinking Britain’s relationship with the EU.

And anyway - rejoining the Single Market wouldn’t be undoing Brexit, it would just be doing literally what the Brexiters promised their voters they would do in the first place.

Starmer is being dramatically too cautious about the most impactful thing he could do to improve things in Britain.

The EU is a capitalist entity, why would any leftist support it?

*gestures generally at modern Britain*

Yawn. He’s a pro-Brexit, anti-net-zero, conspiracy-theory-peddling demagogue. He literally endorsed and then tried to get selected as a candidate for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in 2019.

Why are people who claim to be on the left even giving Galloway the time of day?

They’ve yet to try the ‘pick the candidate with the most sensible policies’ method.

No, they’re not even proposing to replace the House of Lords here. All they’re proposing is to remove the remaining 92 unelected hereditary peers (out of around 800+ total unelected peers) who survived Blair’s 1999 cull of most hereditary peers.

No, it’s member of Parliament who’s not a frontbencher - i.e. who’s not a government minister or an official spokesperson for their party in Parliament.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves and Ed Davey don’t hold government office, since they’re opposition politicians, but they’re not backbenchers.

You do have to feel for these red wall Brexit voters.

Apparently they require constant visual assurance that they are in fact still in Britain, and can’t just maintain this information in their heads like the rest of us.

https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/the-housebuilding-crisis/

Compared to the average European country, Britain today has a backlog of 4.3 million homes that are missing from the national housing market as they were never built.

[…]

Housebuilding rates in England and Wales have dropped by more than a third after the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, from 2 per cent growth per year between 1856 and 1939 to 1.2 per cent between 1947 and 2019.

This has been a key factor behind the UK’s long-standing housing crisis, which has led to inflated property prices and soaring rents in recent decades.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/JCp2k

Calling the government’s reforms a “grubby concession” to backbenchers who want to block housing development, Matthew Pennycook, shadow housing minister, has pledged that Labour would enact “mandatory targets that bite on individual local planning authorities” if it came to power.

The issue of housing and planning is set to be a point of contention in this year’s general election, with the Centre for Cities think-tank estimating that the UK has a historical backlog of 4mn unbuilt homes, with an average house in England now costing more than 10 times the average salary.

deleted by creator

What a nonsense idea. Good politicians will never exist if they have a median income imposed on them.

Do you think that qualified, capable people - doctors, lawyers, economists, engineers - are going to want to go into politics, and deal with all the pressure, attention and abuse for them and their families that comes with that, for a median income? The sort of people we should want to see more of in politics typically already take large pay cuts to become backbench MPs. We want more capable and intelligent people in politics, not fewer.

You pay peanuts and you get Truss.

Well the Whigs didn’t die off; they merged with the Radicals and the Peelites to form the Liberal Party, who later merged with the SDP to form the Liberal Democrats.

I think a more realistic objective is for the combination of the Tories’ broader decline plus the Tory/Reform split to knock them out of being a top two party in England. FPTP is unrelenting - I can just about imagine a scenario like the Liberals experienced in the early 20th century, where the Lloyd George/Asquith split and the trauma of governing through the First World War took them from the largest party prior to the 1918 election, to the third party following the 1922 election.

In that ideal scenario, we’d see a two-pronged squeeze where the Lib Dems supplant the Tories as the party of the middle class South of England and Outer London, and Labour supplant them in their North and Midlands seats. Once the Tories are no longer part of the FPTP duopoly, the electoral system makes it very difficult for a third party to ever get back to where it was.

I can’t find the SNP and PC breakdowns, but assuming 4% and 0.5% respectively then Flavible projects this as: Lab 451, Con 75, SNP 53, Lib Dems 45, PC 3, Green 1, Reform 0. And if the Tories dropped another two points, it would leave them as the 4th party in Parliament…

I found this a really interesting tool for understanding the picture across different bits of the electorate.

I’m a hard no.

I think people should vote, and voting is generally pretty easy in this country - including easy access to postal and proxy voting. So anyone who fails to do the basic bare minimum in a democratic society (of turning out to vote in a general election every five years) is someone who is clearly so disengaged from politics that I really wouldn’t want them casting their uninformed RNG vote and deciding the future of this country.

This is what happened at the EU referendum. There had long been an assumption that a higher turnout was good for Remain (Leavers were more motivated, so higher turnout meant it was more likely that moderate Remain voters were turning out). But what actually happened was turnout went so high that it blew past them and into a load of nihilists who didn’t give a shit about anything and voted Leave just for the fuck of it. These are not the people who should be deciding our future.

I would prefer that voter turnout was higher than it is, but that’s because I think political engagement should be higher. That’s the thing we should be targeting; voter turnout is the symptom, not the cause. If you force people who aren’t evenly barely politically engaged to cast a vote, you’re asking for a shitshow.