UK Politics
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This wouldn't be happening if Labour had competent leadership. Instead, Starmer is letting Farage and his mob drive the agenda, even shamelessly adopting the worst of their policies, such as the harassment of people with indefinite leave to remain: follow the rules, work with the system, get cated and screwed over. Great fucking message. And the fascists are still not going to vote Labour. It'll just encourage Labour's voters to stay home or vote Green.
This wouldn't be happening without Russia actively funding right wing extremism everywhere.
But yeah, what the FUCK is up with Starmer? He's not doing social democratic policy, he's doing right wing nutjob shit. What is that?
I’m not sure I agree. That’s not me saying Labour’s leadership is competent.
But we keep circling around “the message just isn’t being heard”.
I think the message js being heard fine, it’s just that people disagree with it. Labour’s core philosophy around how we should treat refugees and asylum seekers just doesn’t line up with what many voters believe.
Until we recognise that people, rightly or wrongly (I believe it’s wrongly, but that’s beside the point), feel immigration really genuinely is too high, and “we should take care of our own first”, Labour will, I think, continue to lose (as will the Tories) and Reform will continue to gain.
The social democrats of Denmark “solved” this. And when I say “solved”, I simply mean they adopted a policy on immigration that I personally don’t agree with, but one which has kept the more extreme views out of too much influence. Their argument, at least the public argument, is that “immigration puts pressure on those with few resources first” and “to look after those people, we need to curb immigration”. They call this “good social democratic policy”, and call out that immigration can’t be seen as more important than looking after those we’ve got.
If Labour wants to regain relevance in the industrial ghost-towns, they have to move towards an expressed and inacted “harder line” on immigration.
I don’t think they will, or can, or should. And therefore we are seeing weird FPTP results all around the country (LibDem suddenly have a huge chance of winning my own constituency, where before they were a remote third), but with an overall push towards Reform UK.
If you really want to change that picture, supporting our education system so that people vote backed by data, not by emotions, is the real change we need. But that doesn’t serve anyone - the uneducated can much more easily be told what to believe and thus vote.
Maybe Immigration and asylum seekers are not our biggest fucking problems. By constantly focusing and oscillating the discourse around a false dichotomy like that (immigrants, YES! vs immigrants, NO!), you can only but lose to populists and extremists.
Focus on proactive measures making people's lives better, state long term goals, focus on education, healthcare, and running a fair and functioning society, and most other ills are either resolved or see great improvement.
Inmigrants are a red fucking herring when we have profoundly and absurdly rich people using their wealth to manipulate democracy in order to get ever more money and power.
I mean, there's a reason most countries don't do what you're describing, and that's that it's economic suicide. It's easy to forget it what with the fascism and all that, but the first world is currently going through a demographic crisis and needs all the labor it can get.
In that case our democracy has lost all meaning.
If we can't do what's right, or best, for society, because "the economy" says so, then the economy has become the de facto governing principle of our nations. Which is clearly the case, as we can see.
If money is power, then capitalism is a form of government. But capitalism doesn't say shit about good human life, good human society, it only concerns itself with the accumulation and production of "wealth", and "good human society" is at best an afterthought, at worst an impediment to that process.
The whole world has become a game of monopoly. The rules suck, it's unfair, and in the end someone will flip the board and there will be violence.
Always has been? Like, we tend to abstract this stuff as "the economy,"* but of course the (or at least a) governing principle of any society is keeping its members at least somewhat fed and clothed. Even if cutting immigration was going to curb the rise of the far right (it won't), it's not an option because it'd seriously compromise the welfare of society.
*This is ignoring the other economy, which refers to rich people's yacht money.
I 100% agree. I was talking about what I think Labour should do if it wants to stay relevant in British politics, not what I believe we, as a country, should do.
It would, because competent labour leadership wouldn't be able to magic up the growth they need to not have to have a shit choice at each budget. The best leadership in the world can't undo years of underinvestment and a massive spike in inflation, but had to pretend they could to get into power.