Politics Thread!

[KlaxonCow]

So, Starmer is U-turning on his "green prosperity plan".

As usual, he's running scared of Tory attacks and the right-wing press, as he envisions headlines about "mad" plans and being called "a tree hugger". That they'll "Corbyn" him as a Communist Nazi, should he step out of line.

But, for fuck's sake, this is exactly what the country - what the world - needs and he should grow some balls, and go out there to make the argument. Take them on, bat their empty criticisms down with facts.

It's exactly what I've been saying. Governments invest in, say, insulation for people's homes. Those people then have lower energy bills - as their houses retain heat, so you don't have to turn the heating on as often or as high - and, therefore, more money in their pockets. Which they will spend in the wider economy.

It does add up, and he should have the balls to take on the argument. Honestly, this really isn't a hard fight to win with the public. Because it's basically "I'm going to give you free shit, that keeps your energy bills down, so you're slightly less poor".

Like, the Tories can try to have a pop at the scheme as "barmy green nonsense" or whatever. But you can totally get the public on your side by pointing out that you're giving away free shit, in order to tackle the cost of living crisis. You know, the thing that so many people are struggling with that the out-of-touch Tories and their multi-billionaire Prime Minister have done FUCK ALL to help anyone.

He used to be head of the CPS. Arguing the case should be in his nature.

But Keir just runs away like a coward every time. He has a policy, and a Tory just raises an eyebrow in criticism and runs panicking to the hills that "oh no, they're going to call me a communist, like they did with Jeremy Corbyn. This is a fate worse than death, that I must abandon all my good counter policies, at the merest hint of Tory or right-wing press disapproval".

I don't think he's wishy-washy or indecisive. No, I think he's just a plain coward. Avoids any criticism at all - to the point that his enemies can totally shape his policies from a distance. If he has a good idea, just threaten to say something nasty about it. And wanting to please everyone - including all the Tory-voting casual racists - he panics and capitulates.

This is the way we dig ourselves out of the economic hole - this is what Biden did to do exactly that with the Inflation Reduction Act in America - and it will help to bring prosperity, through being a Keynesian infrastructure project that'll produce jobs, prosperity and, as I've covered, will save us all money and put us in profit in the long term.

He's just a yellow-bellied chicken - afraid of his own shadow - that'll capitulate all his policies to the Tories and right-wing press, for fear that they might say something nasty about him, until there's NO FUCKING DIFFERENCE between Labour and the Tories. Like Blair, Labour just becomes the "Tory light" party, with IDENTICAL economic policies. Even though, for fuck's sake, we can all see that the oft-repeated lie of Tory "economic competence" is utter garbage. Always has been.

I've lived under Maggie and the economy was a toilet. Now we've had 13 years of the Tories and the economy is a toilet. They claim "economic competence" but all that Tories ever do is drive the economy into an intolerable shit-hole for poor people to exist inside. Again and again. Maybe if you're mega-rich, then it's awesome. But for 99% of the people, Tory "economic competence" basically means tightening and tightening and tightening the belt on public services, until you cut off the blood and they die.

And it doesn't breed economic growth. Because you can't save negative money to go into growth. That's not logical. Like, I can - with the household finances - tighten my belt and save money. But I can't tighten my belt into having a higher income.

That's "stop the rot getting worse" behaviour - and, in places, you really do need to tighten the belt, of course - but it's not the route to economic growth.

You can sack half your workforce and then be overjoyed on the amount of money you've save on wages. Excellent. But you've also now only got half the people, so you've halved your productivity as well. If your business now does really well, then it can only do half the business that it would have done.

Tory "economic competence" is idiots applying household budgeting to an entire country and having no fucking clue why that doesn't actually work.

And it doesn't work. Look around you.

It's the definition of madness. Doing the same thing again and again, yet expecting a different result. Vote Tory, get poorer. Vote Tory, get poorer. Vote Tory, get poorer. But you keep doing it because the ideological propaganda tells you that Tories have "economic competence", even though they've NEVER fucking demonstrated this at any point. Vote Tory, get poorer. Vote Tory, get poorer. Vote Tory, get poorer.

Yeah, and you voted Brexit as well, right? How's the land of unicorns and rainbows going for you so far? It's blatantly bankrupt. Not true. Yet idiots vote for it again and again, because the memes tell them Tories make them better off. It's never actually happened. But the memes, Esmeralda, the memes!

[KlaxonCow]

It's also a fear that polling suggests Starmer's simply gotten wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... ir-starmer

Are older, richer voters really against big spending? Maybe not as much as Labour fears

Starmer desperately wants to win back the trust of a crucial, and famously cautious, demographic. But support for public investment is growing
[...]
Robert Ford, a professor of ­political science at the University of Manchester, says Labour’s baby boomer problem can be ­overplayed after a shift in attitudes to ­infrastructure spending since 2019.

Polling shows large majorities across all age groups when they are asked if they support government spending to repair and revive the UK’s infrastructure.

“You can see a crossover point in voting at age 60. So there is still a difference of opinion between the workforce and retirees,” Ford says.

“However, the public responds to conditions, and they can see that conditions – the fabric of the nation – have deteriorated. Surveys show the proportion of people in favour of extra spending is at a 20-year high.”
[...]
Ford believes a bigger problem is how Labour continues to suffer from a general perception that it is not good with money.

“It’s the baggage Labour always struggles with,” he says.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has tried to convince every ­audience she addresses of her ability to understand the economy with a run-through of her CV, beginning with the years spent as an economist at the Bank of England.

Yet such is the pushback, ­especially from newspapers ­representing an older demographic, that Reeves has taken fright, scaling back her ­spending plans to a level that means they won’t need to be funded by higher personal taxes.

Even the more natural penny-pinching Tory voters can see that the nation's infrastructure is badly falling apart. The cost of living crisis - from high energy costs, which green infrastructure renewal directly helps to solve - has reached further up the wealth ladder, that even the middle classes have been feeling the pinch of inflation, and noticed that this one's perhaps beyond "tighten our belts" logic alone.

Indeed, Labour's plan was called "the Green Prosperity Plan". So, rowing back on it, the obvious question is: Why is Starmer against prosperity? Either that, or it was a lie to call it a "prosperity plan"?

Logically, Starmer, it's one or the other. Either you hate prosperity, if you're getting rid of the prosperity plan. Or it's fine to get rid of the prosperity plan, because it wasn't really a prosperity plan and you were lying all along. So which is it, Sir Keir?

Of course, I actually know. Because I've been pointing out and advocating how this would be a prosperity plan for the nation, long before Labour started talking about it and making it their policy. So it is a prosperity plan, in fact, and you are U-turning on a plan for greater prosperity for the nation...

...because you're worried about older marginal Tory voters who, in polling, actually, in majority, would quite like a prosperity plan that fixes our crumbling infrastructure, thank you very much. Because even they can see that 14 years of Tory neglect has gone far too far, in causing the nation to be teetering on the brink of collapse.

Everything costs too much, and public services don't work anymore. Even the most "definition of madness" Tory voter, who keeps putting a cross next to supposed Tory "economic competence" can see the wide-open cracks in that broken meme. Look at the state of the country. It can't possibly be true.

The infrastructure needs to be fixed. We need a Keynesian investment in infrastructure projects, to spur economic growth. To create jobs. To give us perfect energy security. To reduce energy costs permanently. To make future "cost of living" crises - at least any caused by energy costs - an impossible thing that just can't economically happen ever again. It also happens to greatly assist in solving climate change at the same time.

It's an irritant. Politicians still bow to the Murdoch press, even though no-one fucking reads newspapers anymore and his influence really is nose-diving into insignificance. Scared of a baby boomer demographic who's got one foot in the grave and are going extinct (the old calculation that the older someone is, the more likely they are to vote conservative is no longer as solid as it once was - there is a reason why the Tories have been jerry-mandering the constituency boundaries, as they try to rig the vote in their favour. Because if they don't, their eventual disappearance from the election map is demographically guaranteed).

Starmer's running scared, like a coward, from a bogeyman that's not even there. He hated prosperity, apparently, as he's just thrown his prosperity plan away - and it really would have been a prosperity plan for all the reasons I've given a hundred times before.

There is the initial infrastructure costs - but that's why you need governments to back infrastructure renewal - but the new renewable infrastructure is much cheaper than the old fossil fuel infrastructure, and it has perfect energy security, so it just can't ever have these massive spikes in the cost of energy ever again. It will pay for itself and put us into profit - that's true on an individual level, installing solar on your roof, but that multiplied by millions of people all across the country, is also true for the country as a whole.



#StopBurningStuff

[PFVA]

This made me smile just now.

Our far right leader and candidate to the March election organised one of those support demonstrations in an area of Lisbon's district where apparently he is popular, or thinks he is. Almost no one showed up because it's raining, not a storm, just steady rain all morning. The rain was his own explanation.

[F-ZeroOne]

What a bunch of snowflakes!

[gilesgoat]

What puzzles me is that "of course, Tories are UNvotable" .. BUT SO ARE Labour ..

I would never vote tories .. but I would NOT vote for the current Labour as well ( not unless they drop Starmer and they start to get more bold ) ..

.. so what does remain ? ..

[Little stoned kiwi]

A vote for not Labour is a vote for Tory?
That's the common setup enabling one party being shit and the other party even shitter.

The only real alternative is to wait for the the fabric of society to tear. There will be demonstrations, rioting, and looting! You can help that inevitability along by voting for the shittiest option.

[Harlequin]

A vote for not Labour is a vote for Tory?
That's the common setup enabling one party being shit and the other party even shitter.

The only real alternative is to wait for the the fabric of society to tear. There will be demonstrations, rioting, and looting! You can help that inevitability along by voting for the shittiest option.

I will probably be voting LibDem, which is usually far ahead of the Conservatives in my constituency.

[Dio]

A vote for not Labour is a vote for Tory?
That's the common setup enabling one party being shit and the other party even shitter.

The only real alternative is to wait for the the fabric of society to tear. There will be demonstrations, rioting, and looting! You can help that inevitability along by voting for the shittiest option.

Representative democracy, merely the least shit system the world has invented so far?

[PFVA]

Olive oil price up fm 7 € to 12 € in the last year. It's the product with the highest increase in price. And it's a national product not imported. They are blaming it on the drought.

[Rubisco]

A vote for not Labour is a vote for Tory?
That's the common setup enabling one party being shit and the other party even shitter.

The only real alternative is to wait for the the fabric of society to tear. There will be demonstrations, rioting, and looting! You can help that inevitability along by voting for the shittiest option.

Representative democracy, merely the least shit system the world has invented so far?

That’s the problem. First past the post isn’t representative democracy.

[Little stoned kiwi]

I think of it as voting for the same pig and deciding what colour lipstick it wears.
It's still that way even with mixed-member proportional; some of the votes choose the eye-liner colours.

[gilesgoat]

I don't know if it's a failure of the democratic systems or just 'a failure in general of certain system of societies'.

I mean "in general", across countries that are different, there seem to be a "systemic failure" where there are "a number of problems that no matter what government/party they cannot ( or nobody wants to ) be solved".

Maybe "there's really a common denominator factor" and "most of those countries" seems adopted a "capitalism strategy" or let's call it a "business driven strategy".

Most of those problems seems to emerge from a "pretty weak social system", uneven distribution of wealth and such.

And most of the rest seems to come from "attempting to contain discontent/prevent revolutions/silence" people unhappy with all that ?

It really doesn't matter I think who/what you are going to vote if "the underlying system and problems" are NEVER solved/attacked/done something for.

So in essence I think many countries find themselves in the situation of "there's nothing REALLY worth voting" becuase no matter who you vote "the system in place" will remain almost the same with little or NO significant changes at all ?

"The problems will remain the problems" ?

There is NO VERY STRONG "opposition" or ideas or such that say WE ARE DEFINITELY GOING TO CHANGE THAT, FULL STOP.

And even if they would PROBABLY ( FAR TOO ) many people would be opposite to it ?

So what one can do ?

[Dio]

A vote for not Labour is a vote for Tory?
That's the common setup enabling one party being shit and the other party even shitter.

The only real alternative is to wait for the the fabric of society to tear. There will be demonstrations, rioting, and looting! You can help that inevitability along by voting for the shittiest option.

Representative democracy, merely the least shit system the world has invented so far?

That’s the problem. First past the post isn’t representative democracy.

Don't go for ridiculous hyperbolae, please. We're capable of better reasoned discussion than that. I'm absolutely in agreement that it's not a brilliant form of representative democracy, but it is one. More proportional systems are certainly capable of delivering a result you voted for but didn't really want, right?

[Harlequin]

I don't know if it's a failure of the democratic systems or just 'a failure in general of certain system of societies'.

Representative democracy was, I think, created for rather small voter pools in city elections. Most voters either knew the candidates personally or could at least interact with them live. Although taught* and employed, the principles of popularist rhetoric were still quite young in those days before modern mass media advertising, propaganda, image consulting, PR, social media manipulation for the short of attention and post-Goebbels psychological and sociological insights.

In short, the countries and times we vote in are not what representative democracy was designed for and it does not appear to have scaled well.

It really doesn't matter I think who/what you are going to vote if "the underlying system and problems" are NEVER solved/attacked/done something for.

So in essence I think many countries find themselves in the situation of "there's nothing REALLY worth voting" becuase no matter who you vote "the system in place" will remain almost the same with little or NO significant changes at all ?

"The problems will remain the problems" ?

Remember the ancient proverb: "If voting could change the system it would be illegal."



* Primarily by the Sophists, hence my tendency to giggle when people praise anything for being "sophisticated".

[tufty]

The only real alternative is to wait for the the fabric of society to tear. There will be demonstrations, rioting, and looting!

No it isn't, and no there won't.

What's left of the fabric of society will be slowly eroded, and those in power will convince the people that it's the fault of brown people in small boats, or trans women in sports, or whatever the latest scapegoat is, whilst they siphon more of what capital is left directly from your pockets.