Advocate UBI as a response to coronavirus
Keir Starmer Labour Leader
- Thread starter Damien
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Got more chance of him advocating UB40.
The data doesn't indicate UBI would work, and doesn't tackle the real problem of poverty - https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-basic-income-public-realm-poverty-inequality
It's a bit of a muddled paper that – trials that support UBI aren't really UBI, which means UBI doesn't work. It's also very much written from a trade union perspective where dependence on employment is seen as a good thing. That's fine if employment is readily available. That's not where we are heading.
But whatever you want to implement — a tapered UBI, minimum income guarantee, negative income taxes — we are going to need something radical and it would be nice to see Labour advocating for something, rather than just saying "we support the government measures but they should bring back press conferences".
I get the need for 'radical' ideas to be different, but radical doesn't work when you're not in power. The first thing Labour need to sort is making themselves electable, and advocating UBI at the moment isn't probably the best approach for victory.
The only thing more embarrassing than Sir Keith are his supporters. You centrists have absolutely no self awareness.
Deary me.
He shouldn't have abandoned calling for a second referendum… he'd be 20 points ahead! /s
Polling well among Conservative voters is only a good thing if they are seriously considering changing their vote.
Corbyn still living rent free it seems.
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Ah I see that coronavirus is really an issue of vibes, and as long as we have confidence it doesn't matter what the rules are.
It's from the same account you posted yours from, you just forgot to post that particular one.
Corbyn still living rent free it seems.
The acceptance by many over how shit Starmer and Labour have been over covid really shows there's no actual politics in the party atm.
Years of calling for a "real opposition" from anyone to the right of the Labour left and then when a crisis hits, there's nothing.
Paranoid much ?
The whole point of Starmer is the idea of "electable" and of a " real opposition" but if all you're interested in is having an politician more popular than Corbyn(A deeply unpopular politician)than cool whatever I guess but it's not a conversation I have any interest in tbh. Are you not concerned at all with Starmer so far ?
The next 4 years really is just going to be a rightward drifting Labour party and any criticism to be met with but Corbyn was bad!!!
Nice dystopia you've got here.
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Do you think it’s possible to get a left-wing party into government?
He’s just a bit shit, isn’t he? Uncharismatic, insipid, very self-conscious lest he say anything of substance.
Opposition is back; opposition that the Tories could stomach losing to, that is. He comes across as competent and intelligent, which is a rare skill in politics admittedly and it’s basically all his personality resides in. The worry has got to be that personally he is bland and so is his politics. Like a much more polished Ed Miliband but with even fuzzier views. Put him up against Sunak in 2024 and I don’t think he stands a chance.
I mean you posted a chart with the implication he was losing support among Labour voters. I posted the context that he's actually still around the level where Corbyn was at his most popular. If you're really interested in digging into the figures, how about his net approval next to Johnson? (Beating him by 20 points, positive among every group including the olds.) How about whether people think of him as Prime Ministerial? (38% yes, 24% no.) How about how many people think Labour being in government would be chaotic? (Fewer than the previous two Labour leaders managed, which could be worth watching as that was always a key attack line.) And the "ready to form the next government" chart is worth looking at as well, people disagreeing below 50% for the first time since Blair's time. People agreeing is still low, and that paired with Starmer's surprising level of popularity and the Prime Ministerial question (+22% and +14% respectively) it suggests he's currently more popular than the party and trust still needs winning back until people think they can govern.
Why do you mean by left ?
Honestly I don't know, there's giant barriers to any "left" party such as Scotland, the long trend of the Labour "heartlands" going to the right, the generational divide and many more things. All of which goes far beyond simply replacing the top of the Labour party.
At the moment the issue isn't policy(At I'm sure it will become one) it's this -
I've already gone over this in the post you quoted.Also look at the time stamp of the tweet I didn't miss it because it was posted hours after the original thread and my post on here(I had fecked off to watch blade runner for the millionth time).
None of which is resulting in decent polling during a pandemic and a shite Tory response(Look at how well the Dems are doing in the US).
So ?
If you like his time as leader then fair enough I guess but Christ he's been shite during the BLK protests and covid.
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That's fair enough, as is Blade Runner.
The US seems to be an outlier due to how comically bad Trump is from what I can see, governments everywhere are getting boosts right now, Macron was getting obituaries written not that long ago and is now at 40-50% approval in France. Outside of the Cummings episode (before which the government lead had been 20+ points since March), people haven't been that annoyed with the government (in this same poll they're at -4, which doesn't suggest widespread dissatisfaction when compared to May's handling of Brexit). When the economy begins to bite, that'll probably change.
This piece from Bush is basically how I'm looking at things at the moment -
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He's been basically as I expected, not particularly exciting, very cautious, clearly capable. I wasn't exactly enthusiastic when I cast my vote for him but for someone that became leader in the middle of a health crisis with literally all the attention on the government, who then started spending money like austerity had never been a real thing, he's done fine, which I think is reflected in the public reaction. He'll need to start giving people reasons to actually vote Labour before long, rather than just reasons to stop avoiding voting for them.
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In forty years the only elected Labour government was the Tony Blair government. He won three landslides in a row. Most of the other elections Labour got crushed. I think there ought to be a reckoning that Britain is just a more libertarian nation than is needed for a left-wing government to get elected on a left-wing platform. You could run to the center and shift left just like Johnson realising in order to keep those brexit labour voters he's going to have to pivot from the right to the center and invest in their public services and communities. Now he's got no excuse after taking back control from the big bad european union. The economics of a left-wing platform just doesn't sell unless you change the attitudes of people. The reaction to Labour proposing free broadband by getting involved with private companies said it all. It wasn't an attitude of "we don't want that". There is need for better and more accessible provision of internet. But the reaction was simply "bullshit". No one believed they could do that and cut into a private industry and pay for it so the backlash was that Labour were desperate. That was an own goal of a campaign pledge which if they wanted to pursue they should have kept quiet until after an election win.
@Boycott - an unfortunate quirk of our electoral system is the misapprehension that the number of seats won is an accurate measure of popularity. Theresa May failed to win a majority with 42% of the vote in 2017, Blair won majorities in 2001 and 2005 with 41% and 35% respectively. Blair's success (even in 1997) wasn't based on an unusually high share of the vote, rather a well-distributed vote and a very low Tory vote. In the same way, May's failure in 2017 wasn't because she lost support (in fact, the Tories increased their share of the vote significantly between 2015 and 2017), it was because Labour increased their vote share from 29% in 2015 under Milliband to 40% in 2017 and much of that increase came in marginal seats.
The issue isn't really that there isn't support for left-wing ideas, even in 2019 when Labour ran an awful campaign led by a desperately unpopular leader mired with constant negative coverage, they still polled better than they did in a centrist guise under Brown and Milliband. Polling backs up that left-wing policies aren't unpopular per se. The issue with running on a left-wing platform is twofold: firstly, voters don't have faith in Labour's ability to competently manage large, expensive projects (which frankly has as much to do with the record of centrist New Labour as it does with anything else). Secondly, left wing economics pose a huge threat to vested interests who will throw all their resources into discrediting anyone who espouses them. This was easily done with Corbyn because he'd publically taken a lot of stances (unrelated to economics) which put him at odds with mainstream thought in Britain.
In my opinion, the 2017 manifesto pitched it perfectly - talking about ending austerity and making a simple and common sense 'speculate to accumulate'-type argument for regional infrastructure spending and investment in public services. That's where Labour should be building from.
The issue isn't really that there isn't support for left-wing ideas, even in 2019 when Labour ran an awful campaign led by a desperately unpopular leader mired with constant negative coverage, they still polled better than they did in a centrist guise under Brown and Milliband. Polling backs up that left-wing policies aren't unpopular per se. The issue with running on a left-wing platform is twofold: firstly, voters don't have faith in Labour's ability to competently manage large, expensive projects (which frankly has as much to do with the record of centrist New Labour as it does with anything else). Secondly, left wing economics pose a huge threat to vested interests who will throw all their resources into discrediting anyone who espouses them. This was easily done with Corbyn because he'd publically taken a lot of stances (unrelated to economics) which put him at odds with mainstream thought in Britain.
In my opinion, the 2017 manifesto pitched it perfectly - talking about ending austerity and making a simple and common sense 'speculate to accumulate'-type argument for regional infrastructure spending and investment in public services. That's where Labour should be building from.
So I think it is true that given the current electoral dynamics in this country, and particularly FPTP, that if you want a genuinely radical left-wing government it would probably have to run on a more moderate platform and then veer left once it is elected.
EDIT: As @jeff_goldblum just said… the 2017 manifesto provides a framework for that.
But I have no idea how you communicate to left-wing activists that *wink wink nudge nudge* we are actually radical. And the currently prevailing forces in Labour are quite the opposite from that. RLB's largest donors were the Unions, with no substantial donations from individuals. Starmer's were hedge fund managers, pro-Israel lobbyists, gambling company owners and Blairite peers .
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Yeah, ‘cos they were so hands off!
I think a simple way of saying this is that it's the Labour-Tory swing that is the key dimension in UK politics. Efficiency and third parties play a part, but the movement between the two main parties in any first past the post system is the main driver. In the next election, Labour need a bigger swing than any the Tories have got since 97 just to get level.
Full publication would clear this shit up. Finally these blairite scum bags can stop banging on about the "Corbynista report". If the full publication does indeed show that comments like "pubehead" were taken out of context, all of us lefties can hold our hands up and admit we got it wrong.
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How Boris is polling well baffles me. It is mistake after mistake. Dodgy contract after dodgy contract.
Either the polls are wrong. Or I suspect that the reason Cummings is bullet proof, is because he is conducting wizardry in the digital marketing sector. It seems he has developed software to manipulate public opinion by targeting key marginal voters.
I support your post. But it could have had a larger font size in places and some bold.
Vote for me.
Someone referred to Dianne Abbott as pubehead? I don’t care about context then, that’s racist as feck and should result in immediate expulsion from the party.
Didn't Thatcher begin the gerrymandering? Now constituency boundaries are being reviewed again by the current government. With their track record I'm sure any boundary changes will be fair and balanced, designed to represent the citizens of the UK.
We are not far off only having the illusion of democracy.
Was referring to Katy Clark, not Abbott. Stuff about Abbott was still grim.
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Absolutely despicable. And some on here who claim to support Labour think it’s not a big deal.
Seems I was mistaken regarding the pubehead comment, I thought it was in reference to Abbott.
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Disgraceful. In many ways responsible for contributing to the many years of Tory rule they claim to fight against.
Even more so if they diverted funds away from winnable seats too.
Or the polls are right and it’s just too soon. People need to see labour has changed, not just the leader. Miles from that yet.
If people were paying attention to the vast amount of scandals, they would realise it is the government that we need to see change in. That is where any concerns should sit, not with the opposition.