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Draft talk:2024 United Kingdom general election
Why this election might be the beginning of an interlude, rather than a significant change[edit]
Unless the opinion polls are woefully off or the Tories manage to pull a humongous rabbit out of their collective top hat to stage a historical, electoral upset, the Tories will get thoroughly thrashed.
But it probably won’t matter much in the long run.
Why? Because Starmer has all but committed to a version of “austerity light”. If he actually follows through on this, it will mean that he has effectively tied his own hands. He can’t invest the kind of sums needed to catch up with a decade and a half of Tory underinvestment and he can basically only pray that significant economic growth will somehow appear out of thin air despite this lack of investment.
This means that once the immediate loathing of the Tories wear off and they once again start to promise the moon and stars while blaming all problems on the Labour government, seconded by a lot of the media, Starmer will have very little to run a reelection campaign on. He’s basically likely to end up with a UK version of the “vote blue no matter who” appeal from across the pond, but without having much personal charisma and only the hope that the Tories will run under a Trump-like off putting leader (and granted, that might not be completely unlikely).
I’ve seen very little to suggest that Starmer is particularly popular outside of the “centrist policy wonk” segment and he has done all he could to kill off and cauterise the grassroots enthusiasm left over from the Corbyn era.
Starmer’s main bastion of power is thus the fact that the Tories have become so manifestly inept at governing that even the business lobby is looking elsewhere at the moment. But once that changes, Starmer will be at a serious disadvantage in subsequent elections. The one thing he can be grateful for is the first past the post electoral system, which will probably staunch the bleeding somewhat, as not voting Labour could mean a Tory return in several constituencies.
The sad thing is that this seems like a rerun of several “moderate center-left” parties’ strategies that have generally only strengthened the far right over time, even if those strategies occasionally did yield some sort of momentary success.
Due to the electoral system, Starmer will almost certainly be spared a pasokification process that has kicked once key continental Social Democratic parties to the curb; and the Tories might’ve fucked up so badly, that they’ll lose the next election after this one as well. But I don’t see much of a prospect for Starmer or his ideological strain much beyond that. ScepticWombat (talk) 13:50, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
- You've hit the nail square on this. Starmer has allowed Blair and Mandelson to move into his head, and they're telling him that 'technocratic managerialism' is the way to go, anything which smells remotely as 'socialist' is toxic and 'populism' is a dirty word. Now, this isn't inherently a bad thing - sometimes 'technocratic' can be revolutionary in it's own way - but I'm getting far too much a smell coming off Starmer that 'managerialism' is going to be the keyword, as in 'like now, but done more competently'. I actually think they don't even want a mass party; it is too messy, too 'radical' and uncontrollable. Not managerial at all. Much better for a core of professional politicians funded by a few millionaires.
- Now, I get that the finances are so shot right now that nothing can be promised, but there's got to be limits to this - 'keeping Tory spending plans'? Fuck off. Those plans have [as you note] Austerity returning next year. Everything's falling to bits, you cannot argue 'cutting funding even further' is a credible idea. It will be difficult enough to improve anything on the same budgets, impossible to do it without a 'leech hunt' within the state to get the outsourced rip-off merchants out off our arteries [This weeks' example; £281k a year for one children's home place. An retired manager told me it should be perhaps £100-150k]. In this I am truly hoping Reeves thinks like an economist, not a banker - mainly by understanding that UK.plc needs some 'pump-priming' investment to later on get the economic rewards [example; borrowing to build council housing so we don't then pay landlord's mortgages through Housing Benefit]. But again, this requires political backing from Starmer because this will make the near-term numbers 'look bad', an argument which Brown didn't win with Blair [and why we ended up with so many shit PFIs which are one of the leeches we now need to salt off]. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:39, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
- I really, really, really hope for the sake of the people of the UK that the “fiscal rules” are among the promises that Starmer will U-turn on, like he did on several of those of his Labour leadership campaign. Or that he’ll at least take a flexible approach in interpreting and applying them. Sadly, it seems most likely to me he that will indeed stick to them strictly and thus prioritise the short term numbers over the long term development of the UK economy.
- Even worse, I fear Starmer won’t even try to staunch the bleeding from all of the Tory sponsored leeches that have received contracts to siphon off funds from the public sector. The problem here is that Starmer has continuously proven to be very much a lawyer and a stickler for “proper procedure” and the various niceties, rituals and processes, rather than the actual outcomes (apart from when it comes to ousting leftists from Labour, obviously). My guess is that he’ll just say that contracts are contracts and that cancellation would “hurt the credibility” of the UK public sector as a “serious” counterpart in the future (or something to that effect).
- Like his ideological counterparts, the “mainstream” Democrats from across the pond, Starmer seems to be of the opinion that the problem with the political system is not about the system itself, or even about some of its fundamentally problematic actors, but are merely due to some “bad hats” who don’t “play the game properly”. The obvious problem with this approach, as Nathan J. Robinson pointed out in Current Affairs in 2020, is that there is no invisible referee that pops up to punish those who “don’t play nice”.
- A really low hanging (and practically free) fruit for Starmer would be to either roll back or change the ludicrous Tory voter ID law (which is basically a GOP ripoff) so that it is either rescinded entirely or updated to not blatantly favour the kind of ID held by old people and others who are more likely to vote Tory. I think that this is a pretty good litmus test of his leadership, because there are practically no downsides for him in addressing this. If he doesn’t, then that will probably be a clear sign that he is more concerned with appearances than substance and is basically scared of actually changing things (i.e. that he’s basically a “small c” conservative). ScepticWombat (talk) 20:19, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
- Note that Starmer’s treatment of “the left” within Labour shows that, on some issues, he is indeed very keen on the results and doesn’t care much about how he gets there. My worry is that his approach when dealing with “the left” is an exception to the rule of how he otherwise approaches politics. ScepticWombat (talk) 20:25, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
- I'm somewhat sanguine about voter ID as a concept; it's the application which I gripe at [old person free bus pass? Fine. Young person student card? Nope!] because it so clearly reeks. I would even be okay in having a national ID card system, as long as it doesn't become mandatory to carry it [it's already hard enough to exist in 2024 UK without a form of legal photo ID, of which the only real two we have is a passport or driving licence] or becomes a kind of 'Big Brother' hydra chock full of extra information.
- Note that Starmer’s treatment of “the left” within Labour shows that, on some issues, he is indeed very keen on the results and doesn’t care much about how he gets there. My worry is that his approach when dealing with “the left” is an exception to the rule of how he otherwise approaches politics. ScepticWombat (talk) 20:25, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
- A really low hanging (and practically free) fruit for Starmer would be to either roll back or change the ludicrous Tory voter ID law (which is basically a GOP ripoff) so that it is either rescinded entirely or updated to not blatantly favour the kind of ID held by old people and others who are more likely to vote Tory. I think that this is a pretty good litmus test of his leadership, because there are practically no downsides for him in addressing this. If he doesn’t, then that will probably be a clear sign that he is more concerned with appearances than substance and is basically scared of actually changing things (i.e. that he’s basically a “small c” conservative). ScepticWombat (talk) 20:19, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
- I predict this. If Starmer does stick with Tory spending plans to the iota, he 'respects' all the leech-contracts and doesn't raise taxes - Labour will die / schism by '28 on the simple fact that he will not be able to achieve anything as he will have zero 'room for manoeuvre' fiscally. Alas, I fear they will fall into the trap Blair did in '97 and Wilson did in '64 - as in not using 'being a new govt after a generation of Tory rule' to toss out all the bad shit while they can clearly blame the Tories for it, ditch their election promises on the argument they'd been tricked on the economics and hoping that by the end of the term the 'green shoots' would be truly visible. I hold that the UK public will be a lot more tolerant about 'difficult economic times' than the professional class believes are if Labour can give us a clear roadmap for growth/improvement, which Austerity never did and clearly never delivered.
- KarmaPolice (talk) 16:31, 3 June 2024 (UTC)