You can't reason with insanity.
Keir Starmer Labour Leader
- Thread starter Damien
- Start date
Your mortgage pays for the house you chose to buy.
Council tax pays for bin collections, roads maintenance, street lighting, social care for the elderly and vulnerable, assistance for the disabled, emergency services, public transport, libraries, trading standards, environmental health, leisure centres, youth facilities. The income tax you pay, goes towards the same sort of stuff, plus free healthcare and education.
You seem like a sound fella, but do you really think asylum seekers come here and live the life of Riley? Maybe you should try swapping lives with one. In fact that sounds like a premise for a really good channel 5 TV show. Benefits swap.
Out of interest, which media outlets do you read?
While voting for our populist dear leader Boris?
Wow. You make them sound like a giant teet.
dont read the daily mail but if you like that fantasy by all means dream
What's false about it?
Arteta
i just benefited from a tory help to buy policy.
The decline in votes between 17 and 19 for Labour were huge. The trend was well and truly in motion before yesterday.
The Brexit Party managed to pick up 10,000 votes there having never stood in an election before in 2019.
Hardly a victory cry for Corbyn. Or Labour. Or any of them.
Like I've said, Brexit has killed the party and I'm not sure it's going to survive the fallout over the next decade or so.
He's already blamed immigrants.
you've lost the plotthis is exactly the problem. Someone has quoted the public services provided by all governments alike as a benefit of voting labour. Now you start to sling sly comments. You are not going to persuade me to vote labour by being like that. Or branding me xyz.
its the answer i keep landing at - as a working class man, what can labour do for me? As far as i see Nothing. They need to earn my vote not expect it
This.
Party politics needs to die anyway. Its too tribal. The average voter doesn't even look at the issues or candidates voting record anymore. Are they labour/tory? Then I'm voting. Its nonsense
Oh yeah? That’s completely irrelevant to much of what I’ve just written but happy for you.
I might be looking to purchase next year, and will probably benefit from a similar scheme. That’s done feck all to help the poorest in society that are relying on benefits though.
you just went on about affordable housing. I just gave up a rental property. What do you think people like me getting a boost and moving from rentals to a mortaged property thus lessening demand do to rental prices?
The hero we need.
just doing my part
Nah you’re trolling. I’m out.
Or you dont have an answer?
Help to buy and the stamp duty rule has increased house prices by a record amount during a year that most of the country was put on hold. There's no denying it's a great thing for the people who used those offers, but it was primarily designed to help big business and keep that sector alive rather than individuals.
It's completely artificial though and if there is a collapse in prices once furlough finishes and people potentially lose their jobs it won't go down quite so well.
The Labour vote in Hartlepool has been going down since 1997 with the one exception of 2017 and Corbyn.
None of the issues of welfare, immigration, neglecting councils raised in this thread have anything to do with Corbyn.
Issues that get flagged on the doorsteps because they're easy lines of recall come and go, Corbyn was just that. The structural issues remain and they were mainly caused by Labours legacy of Blair. I think some have amnesia and forget Labour were still pro immigration, high spend, PC culture back then, these aren't new attack lines.
It's strange, because my tiny minded father, Labour supporter forever spouts this shit all the time.
Why does he vote Labour then? Have you ever asked him?
You misunderstand me. I couldn't care less if you vote Tory or not. On the contrary, I'm more than happy to reap the rewards from it.
Your second point is very valid though and you are right to feel that a vote should be earned and not expected.
Based on the political views you've expressed in this thread, you're a Tory. And if these have been your views the whole time, you've been a Tory the whole time.
I'm not sure why it took you so long to realise you're a Tory but I don't think you can blame the Labour party for not catering to desires of right-wing voters. I mean it's not like you're describing positions that Labour have just recently shifted away from.
Hartlepool 2015 and 2019 were very similar results - Labour holding on despite losing a chunk of its support to a Eurosceptic party headed by Nigel Farage. The difference between 2017 and 2021 is that in 2017 Labour under Corbyn managed to win those voters back, whereas in 2021 Labour under Starmer couldn't. How people can try and spin that to be anything other than Starmer's failing is beyond me. Labour did so badly in this election that the Tories didn't need to pick up Brexit Party votes to win, they just needed to poll the same as they did in 2019.
If Labour had retained or improved on their 2019 vote share but still lost because of the Brexit Party vote going to the Tories that would have been understandable. In that situation Starmer's supporters could reasonably point to it as evidence that Corbyn was the problem and that rejecting him and his policy platform was a sound electoral strategy that was starting to pay off. But they lost vote share, and they need to look at why that is instead of peddling this pathetic line that somehow the ghost of Corbyn past is more of a turn-off to voters than Corbyn actually being leader was.
If Labour had retained or improved on their 2019 vote share but still lost because of the Brexit Party vote going to the Tories that would have been understandable. In that situation Starmer's supporters could reasonably point to it as evidence that Corbyn was the problem and that rejecting him and his policy platform was a sound electoral strategy that was starting to pay off. But they lost vote share, and they need to look at why that is instead of peddling this pathetic line that somehow the ghost of Corbyn past is more of a turn-off to voters than Corbyn actually being leader was.
maybe this is true. But on a wider scale i think there has been a blind loyalty to labour from many with these opinions for a very long time. These are themes that are echoed by many labour turned torie voters i know personally and also themes strong in the high brexit vote in many ‘labour strongholds’.
I dont see what labour are doing to try and reverse any of that.
I am intrigued to know what the brilliant political minds put Labour's defeat in Hartlepool down to?
Two years ago, we were called 'part of the problem' for suggesting that the election results were purely and simply a reaction to Brexit. Leave voting constituencies in the Midlands/North turning away from Labour and voting to 'get Brexit done'.
We were told Socialism was unpopular and Corbyn was unelectable. Despite that not really fitting with what we had seen in the previous GE when Corbyn had come within a whisker of being able to form a Socialist Government in the UK for the first time in decades.
Now, surely those people who belittled that as 'too simplistic', who ridiculed Corbyn and backed Starmer must now accept unequivocally that it WAS in fact solely down to Brexit? I just don't see how you can argue anything else?
Two years ago, we were called 'part of the problem' for suggesting that the election results were purely and simply a reaction to Brexit. Leave voting constituencies in the Midlands/North turning away from Labour and voting to 'get Brexit done'.
We were told Socialism was unpopular and Corbyn was unelectable. Despite that not really fitting with what we had seen in the previous GE when Corbyn had come within a whisker of being able to form a Socialist Government in the UK for the first time in decades.
Now, surely those people who belittled that as 'too simplistic', who ridiculed Corbyn and backed Starmer must now accept unequivocally that it WAS in fact solely down to Brexit? I just don't see how you can argue anything else?
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Owning property fundamentally changes people politics, it makes them conservative. While the media of course plays a part and does blur some working class interests , imo the media gives answers to the reactionary politics that grow out of homeownership.
It's no surprise the argument of people on the dole getting awarded ''woke' tokens and free personal calls from the ghost of Hugo Chavez, comes from a homeowner.
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Of course you can. You can argue that the election results were down to Brexit and a host of other problems, including Corbyn.
The lack of nuance shown by people who insist on blaming one thing (be it Brexit, Corbyn or whatever) for Labour's decline is remarkable.
Starmer has not helped gain voters back, and has almost certainly been a deterrent as another "London, Eurocentric, Remainer, out of touch with former Labour heartlands".
But Corbyn was a turn off too, and what's probably swayed it more than anything from 2017 to now is that the Tories have gotten rid of May - who was trying to achieve the impossible with all the charisma of a dead fish - and opted for populist bluster and parade. They're a government that is genuinely seen to be doing what Hartlepool overwhelmingly voted for in the referendum, spearheaded by a relatable figure. Add to that the boost the vaccine roll-out has given the Tories, and there's enough to explain yesterday's results that go beyond the realms of Labour's control.
Labour need a complete re-set which will almost certainly only be possible after a few years in the political abyss. They've simply got no solid-ground to rely on outside of London and university cities. Leaders aren't going to change that around overnight, and there certainly aren't the characters in the party to do this currently.
Doesn't that mean you were never actually a Labour supporter, though, if the only reason you can think of why you used to be a Labour voter is "blind loyalty effect"? So how can you complain about Labour "losing Labour voters", when the only thing that apparently changed was you?
But he looks so much better in a suit than the last few Labour leaders, how could he lose? 
The Mikel Arteta of politics.
The Mikel Arteta of politics.
You're alright Jack.
Let's play a game, we'll list all the media outlets we don't read rather than the ones we do.
I wonder why...
We talk politics all the time, which is often very stressful. If you're looking for a cogent framework from which he derives a conclusion then I'm at a loss. Like most folk he's a gumbo of conflicting ideas, opinions and emotions out of which bubble up a bunch of positions. If pushed I'd say tradition and memory cause him to still vote Labour. He always has done. He remembers what the Tories visited on his town in the eighties. He spent his working life interacting with them and fighting his corner against their education policies. I'd say he still votes red because despite his belief that Labour have abandoned working class people in favour of a sort of minority driven US style liberalism they still represent the interests of the general poor more than the Tories. He recognises that despite the bluster and the rhetoric the abiding truth remains that the Tories couldn't give less of a shit for the people of places like Hartlepool. This makes him precisely the captive Labour have relied on for decades. Not really represented, not really helped and generally ignored even in the rhetoric.