this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
157 points (98.8% liked)

UK Politics

3090 readers
52 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It's time to see if the polls are right.

Previously: the voting megathread

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (5 children)

So looking forward to the next five years...

Looking at how Reform and Lib Dems made significant gains in vote share you have to wonder if its still worth Labour chasing after the right wing vote that Reform achieved. I just do not see the where the voters who voted Reform actually believe Starmer on the key issues that Reform campaigned on, immigration, anti "woke", and Brexit. I cannot see Labour ever gaining the lead on those issues over someone like Farage who will always position himself to the right of whatever Labour or the Tories campaign on. I cant even see Labour being trusted at the voting booth on these right wing issues over a rebuilt Tory party. Its a fools errand to try.

The Lib Dem vote share, as with Reform, boosted by previous Tory voters but Lib Dems campaigned on almost the opposite of Reform (with some tactical, local, NIMBYism) and achieved way more seats on a lower overall percentage vote than Reform. If you are going to pick a direction to go in, wouldn't it make more sense to move towards the Lib Dems position to shore up in time for the next election?

Labour did worse total percentage of the vote than 2017, its more that the Tories collapsed losing about 20% of their vote that caused this swing in seats. The Tories will rally next time around and a lot of the seats look winnable for them with only a small local swing. The current stance of Labour simply isn't popular enough to be a vote winner against a rebuilt Tory party.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Yes, but I think you're overstating how right wing Labour pitched it. There were no claims to be anti woke. I think it was a pretty firmly centrist pitch. It's the Conservatives who are going to panic and try to out-nutcase Farage. Labour are going to try and be responsible and fix the broken ship. It's just whether they can do it fast enough for people to notice a big improvement in the cost of living vs wages problem.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Are you forgetting Starmers statements around women only spaces as it seems like it.

Farages entire point of existence is to drag the overton window to the right, which he succeed yet again, particularly around Brexit.

The other big concession Starmer made, this time because of the Tories, was not to raise taxes, which was also incredibly dumb. As was honouring triple lock.

My biggest issue with Starmer making claims like these is that he will stick to them. Someone like Boris is too lazy and an out and out liar so has no problem dropping things. Starmers big pitch to be different is that he will stick with what he says.

By sticking to what he said around terfs issues, Brexit, taxes, he really fucks his options in these areas, and for what? As you and I have both said, toil not out crazy Farage or be trusted by people who these are important issues for, so it's a massively stupid thing to do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

You make very good points.

load more comments (2 replies)