I get that,but I just cant warm to Starmer at all and he appears to be doing everything he can to alienate the left of the Labour party. He just doesn't inspire me at all but then hardly anybody in the Labour party does. It is becoming the party of the middle class liberals, more akin to the American Democrats than the Party of Socialist values.
I did post, maybe on here I cant remember exactly that the EU referendum would damage the Labour party far more than it would the Tories because Labour always had a tradition of being Anti-EU that had been supressed by the Blairites and this allowed the working class to be exploited by the far right for nefarious ends as Labour was seen as the party of the liberal metropolitan elite. It was Starmer and his disastrous stance on the EU that allowed the Tories to take the red wall. Corbyn should have come out and been true to himself and supported leave, but he was hamstrung by the Labour PLP and that opened the door for an opportunist like Johnson to take power. The Labour party PLP is as responsible for that **** Johnson being in power as anyone.
It breaks my heart to see the likes of Reeves in the shadow cabinet, she supported Osbornes crusade against the welfare state and many in the Labour party like Cooper did as well, they let the working class down big time. This all created the conditions for the perfect storm that resulted in Johnson being able to convince working class people that the Tories had their interests at heart. The actions of those handful of cunts at Labour HQ and the traitorous actions of Watson have left the party in disarray, it is losing members by the thousands and the chance it had for real change has passed and the Tories as proven by the events of this week are virtually untouchable. The only saving grace is Brexit and what comes after, maybe Labour can rise again after Brexit but it fucking wnt if it comes out as a pro-rejoin party. It has to accept the reality of BREXIT and revel in the fact we are out of the capitalist club and act accordingly, sadly under Starmer I just cant see that happening and can only see at least another decade of Tory misrule.
Nay, nay and thrice nay, Russ.
Think back to the Blair/Brown government. For all their faults, they made the lives of the majority of working people better. They did two things in particular: they improved our public services by putting a lot more money into them, and they improved the household incomes of the overwhelming majority of working class families through the tax credits system. Although they never called it that, the introduction of Working Families Tax Credits was pure redistribution of wealth.
Let me remind you of the way the scheme worked. If you were in work and earned less than a certain amount, - about 50k a year from memory, so the overwhelming majority of the working population, you were entitled to a tax credit - a cash payment from the government. There was a relatively modest basic entitlement, which increased for part time workers, single parents, those with disabilities and those needing childcare. The greater the need, the more generous the payment, and unlike previous benefit systems it didn’t penalise returning to work or working. Rather, it encouraged it because you lost only about a third of your benefits for every pound you were over the threshold.
it was no surprise that one of the first acts of the coalition government in 2010 was to reduce massively the value to most families of the tax credit regime. You can argue about whether that was purely a result of the desire to reduce the deficit, or was ideologically driven. Either way, it happened: those receiving the tax credits either lost them completely or saw the payments reduced. The rest is history: you don’t need me to tell you what kind of an impact a decade of austerity has had on the neediest people in our society.
For all that Blair and Brown are criticised by many as being Tory-lite, they have done more for working people in the last forty years than every other leader of the Labour Party put together, and by a vast difference, because they have been in office. I sometimes wonder whether “I’m Not A Tory” is a good enough reason for voting for someone like Starmer. Then I look at the Covid 19 death toll and it reminds me that it is. He might not be as left wing as you’d like, but if he is elected he will achieve a damn sight more to defend working people than Corbyn or Miliband. So if you don’t warm to Starmer, I don’t blame you because that won’t sit well with your principles, and that’s fine. I completely respect that whilst not agreeing. But I do ask that you recognise that he will be better for us as a nation by far than the cretins we have running the show now, and that is perhaps that is reason enough. People are dying, unnecessarily, because of ideological decisions this mob have taken, and they are lying to us about
how many, when and why. Maybe all politicians lie, but this bunch of cunts have taken it way beyond the next level.
Brexit, by the by, is a ship that has sailed. Those who know me know why I think it was a bad idea, promoted furiously by those who wanted to avoid the incoming new wave of anti tax avoidance laws emanating from the EU and likely to hit our serviced based economy far harder than it would hit Europe. Whether I was right or wrong is a moot point: we’ve left. What follows now is doing the best we can as a nation. We won’t rejoin, because even if we wanted to - and Brexit is now a matter of faith for many, not reason - the EU wouldn’t let us back on the same terms as we had before, with our rebate and our opt-outs. It would be too much of a National humiliation for us to go back in without the advantages we have just thrown away and our national character won’t, in my view, stand for it. Also, even leavers recognise, I think, that even though they won the vote, our society is not a better place for having gone through the experience of the last four years. I expect Starmer to recognise that, and to understand that we can’t tear ourselves apart as a nation the way we have done since the referendum. So we’re out, and for better or for worse, we’re staying out.
