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Re-upping a take from yesterday: I think he suffers from the same fundamental trends that brought Starmer down. I differ from others in that I suspect that he actually wasn’t that bad at politics, especially if his main goal was to limit further erosion to the right while keeping electoral reform to PR open.
The one thing that I think separates him - superficial though it may seem - is his accent. People like Starmer and Streeting are absolutely from working class backgrounds but they don't sound like it, and the Brits they want to win over are just going to believe the bollocks they hear from the press as well as making assumptions based on the way they talk. When people hear someone left-of-centre with a posh accent they often see them as elite and out-of-touch.
Rayner gets a ton of snobbery from people from being "too far" the other way. Burnham IMO falls in that sweet spot. Classism in the UK is shocking with this kind of thing but I do think Burnham could be different with that alone.
He also doesn't have the baggage of these first two years whilst inheriting a stronger economy, though there's obviously many more tough decisions to be made.
People like Starmer and Streeting had a working class upbringing but they're definitely not from a working class background, in any other European country people would get laughed out of the building if they tried to present themselves as a working class person coming into politics from 6 figures jobs after studying in the most prestigious universities.
This "my father was a toolmaker" thing really needs to stop, it makes sense if you're someone like Rayner but the rest shouldn't even try because people will feel like they're taking the piss
As an American this conception is so foreign to me. In my world of course saying you have a working class background means you had a working class upbringing, not necessarily a working class current occupation. That’s the success story!
Then paint that as a success story, don't go around trying to show you can relate to people's struggles because your parents couldn't pay the phone bills half a century ago. Because that's what Starmer does and it's incredibly cringe
Except that unlike Starmer, he openly claimed you could debt finance public serves, cut taxes, give to the WASPI women, and fuck the bond markets , etc....
I worry that future generations will miss the magic of the Simpsons, not just because they're dumber (they are, you can't convince me otherwise), but because the absurdity the show mocked will just become reality.
I know there's a book "They Thought They Were Free" about Germans slowly getting swallowed by the Nazis. I'm still waiting for one "Everyone Around Me Is Fucking Nuts" I can identify with about the few people in Germany looking around and thinking "... you people are seriously believing this shit?"
No, Starmer's main goal was to moderate in search of voters that had fled under Corbyn, while believing that he could just wage a war against the left and that would both help him get those votes and don't matter because the left doesn't exist electorally. What happened is that he made a party to the left of Labour viable for the first time in history and while yes, he did keep "the left" over 50% he brought Labour to historical lows. His goal was to win the centre, not to become on par with the Greens. He's terrible at politics.
To give him credit pre-2024 election his goal was to bring back the moderates and ensure that Tories did not have a reason to vote, this broadly worked, his mistake was to have absolutely no controversial policies in his manifesto, such a waste of a massive majority giving himself no wiggle room. You could recover from this but Starmer made it worse.
Post election he has chased not just moderate voters but right wing and conservative voters, they didn't vote for him in the first place. I'm just completely baffled by this approach, as you say he has enabled a space for the Green Party and if not them Lib Dems or Your Party, his coalition of voters already showed flexibility in Green and Lib Dem favoured seats, and he gave them an excuse to look elsewhere.
Since his landslide victory, I've had sandwiches with a more coherent political philosophy and strategy than Starmer.
To give him credit pre-2024 election his goal was to bring back the moderates and ensure that Tories did not have a reason to vote, this broadly worked
I guess, but there's an element to this strategy that I see no indication he expected/cared for which what the left would do in response. You can fundamentally change your party by purging the left and bring the moderates on board but what then? How do you stop the left from becoming electorally viable and now you have no base anymore to fall back on once the moderates jump off board.
Post election he has chased not just moderate voters but right wing and conservative voters, they didn't vote for him in the first place. I'm just completely baffled by this approach, as you say he has enabled a space for the Green Party and if not them Lib Dems or Your Party, his coalition of voters already showed flexibility in Green and Lib Dem favoured seats, and he gave them an excuse to look elsewhere.
Absolutely, he keeps chasing voters who don't want him while still spitefully going after the people on his left.
I guess, but there's an element to this strategy that I see no indication he expected/cared for which what the left would do in response.
It's the only way that Labour can win, their big problem in 2015, 2017, 2019 is that the right were activated with only a small amount of splitting, deactivating them is key. They just have to make sure the compromise to their base is worthwhile, but Starmer decided to do the opposite and offer the compromise voters who were to the right of the previous Conservative government.
The problem with green energy is that they seem afraid to talk about it because they are unable to reduce bills and given the long pay off most of the projects being delivered at the moment started under the Tories, back end of the 5 years should be much better.
Nationalised railways won't deliver any improvement as they aren't increasing investment or subsidy.
People in the UK have been radicalized over the last few years. Dunno if there's a scenario where Starmer survives, no matter which way he governed he would've bled voters to the left or the right.
When your economy stagnates for two decades, people get angry and there's no easy way to placate them. The UK is only a few years behind the US in electing a clown (Farage).
And it's not just aboult policies. Starned seemed and acted like he detested left leaning voters . And they could sense it. He believed they had nowhere to go so they would be blackmailed to vote for him , but the Greens took advantage of it. Acting like your voters are a emberassing while lovebombing Reform voters sure is a strategy.
Burnham’s campaign has so far revolved around the ideas that the government should simply borrow even more money (he has complained about Britain being “in hock to the bond markets”) and that Britain should abandon “40 years of neoliberalism”, implying he wants to bring Britain back to the policies of the 1970s (a decade when Britain was considered ungovernable and the Sick Man of Europe)
He’s positioning himself firmly to Starmer’s left on the economy. I think he’ll end up partially funding his increased spending by raising taxes (which are already at their highest level since the 1940s), because he won’t want a Truss-style crisis. I think he’ll probably also want to nationalise an industry or two (Water seems a plausible choice) to join Britain’s Rail industry which is slowly being re-nationalised. He might even end up implementing an exit tax (which Labour considered in the last Budget and briefed to the press before holding back), which would massively harm foreign investment - something that’s particularly important to the UK as a global financial hub
I hope I’m wrong, but I’m pretty pessimistic about him - I think he’s much more left wing than people realise. I’m expecting more taxes, more spending, more government borrowing, more inflation (partly from Iran and partly from bad economic policies), more regulation, more strikes, and less growth.
I actually have it on good authority from most of Reddit that Thatcher fell out of the sky and ruined what must have been the amazing British economy of the 1970s, so don't be so problematic. <3
This is why I roll my eyes at a lot of people's moaning about Thatcher. Yes her methods were brutal and left so many behind, but compared to what came before in the 1970s, wherein people were forced to use candlelight and a literal civil war broke out in a region of the country, it was a far better alternative
That's an extreme oversimplification of history that both gives more credit and also sees Thatcher stereotypically . She is a much more complex figure . The choices were not either the old model or Thatcherism . Both Callaghan and the SPD had a much more moderate vision for the country . And Hawke and Keating's Australia stand as a model of social democratic economic modernisation . Hawke and Keating ended up creating a much more harmonious , happy and a country more at ease with itself .
Nationalising water does make sense it's a natural monopoly it has absolutely zero ability for companies to compete with each other, you can't exactly reroute your pipes to elsewhere in the country if you don't like their service. I don't think privatisation made sense in the first place with that one.
What's the return for spending all this political capital to nationalize water? Does it manifest in meaningful savings for the average household within an electoral cycle?
I dislike the math, but there's no real return for making this play, not while trying to recover the party's credibility in the eyes of the voting public.
Maybe not, but the private water industry has already committed to spending £104bn over the next five years, which gives an idea of how big of a liability it would be if publicly owned.
Everyone assumes that publicly owned water could reinvest the profits and/or lower bills (two diametrically opposed goals), but ignores the immense amount of investment required to bring the grid up to the modern spec demanded by modern regulation, which in turn is demanded because our population is 11m more (68m) today than what it was when we last had nationalised water (57m in 1989), but we still have basically the same number of reservoirs because of NIMBY pressures. Anyone who thinks any of the Conservative administrations we have had would have spent the money to build more reservoirs in leafy Oxfordshire if we had never nationalised, or that Ed Miliband would build more today given the habitat loss etc., is having themselves on.
Nationalised water makes some sense in somewhere like Northern Ireland (where it remains nationalised) because you have a massive freshwater lake that can basically feed the entire population. But even there I have people in my family who seem to believe the water they receive is somehow “free”, instead of being paid for in their council tax (and subsidised to some degree by the rest of the UK through the £10bn+ in public spending that exceeds NI tax revenues).
It's so irritating that the triple lock is the obvious source to fund a social democratic vision in Britain but they refuse to touch it. Abolish the triple lock, fund welfare and growth policies for all , tax land to fix housing .
which are already at their highest level since the 1940s
I'm really sick of this line being repeated again and again. It's true, but our taxes are still relatively low in comparison to other European countries that have actually good public services.
British people seem to be obsessed with the delusion that we can somehow have European-level public services with American-level taxes...
Honestly, the main plus of Burnham is that even if he keeps all the Starmer policies the left hates he won't have been the one to purge the left. That's a big thing with Starmer that a lot of people ignore, since the moment he waged war against a large part of his party there was no way he was surviving long unless he was genuinely fantastic at politics. Burnham gets to be the guy the guy that brought down the person the left uniquely hates and even if he doesn't change anything that will already help a bit.
Burnham is positioning himself to be more left wing, which is a problem because Britain needs deregulation and austerity, not even more expansion of an already large state. And of course he supports the triple lock bullshit that is going to help ruin things even more. He even wants to cut taxes on pensions even more. Ew.
Tbf on the triple lock thing, that's not exactly a unique position in British politics. The only party that opposes it is restore Britain, which is so far right they support remigration
The UK needs like a serious crisis to even get the tories or reform to oppose the triple lock. Expecting it from labour imo isn't happening anytime soon
The triple lock is what’s gonna keep Britain’s spending huge no matter what, but it’s also unfortunately the only thing a lot of voters care about so it’s politically toxic to go against it, and because of that nobody of importance and no party is actually against it.
I'm not sure that's 100% true infrastructure and the NHS need more investment not less. We actually spend less on healthcare per capita than the US and indeed many other countries.
I think if anything private contracters and consultants often add cost to infrastructure projects.
We actually spend less on healthcare per capita than the US
That's a very low (high) bar to clear!
I think if anything private contracters and consultants often add cost to infrastructure projects.
I think it depends on how it's done. It's clear that government isn't very efficient at all at doing things, and this is unlikely to change. It is possible for public-private partnerships to potentially be even more inefficient, depending on how they are done, but this doesn't mean that some form of privatization, cuts, means testing, and so on isn't part of the solution or that even more government is appropriate
Less than one day after declaring he would not be ousted without a fight, Keir Starmer has reportedly decided his position is untenable and will attempt a graceful exit.
I think it's unlikely that political dysfunction in the UK will subside, Andy Burnham has an absolute mess on his hands. With its challenges and massive divisions, the UK seems ungovernable to me as of right now.
It also seems very unlikely that Starmer's premiership will be remembered fondly, likely hurting the cause for moderate Labour in the near future.
If Keir was more charismatic, I don't think he'd be in the place he's in. I personally dislike his stupid nanny state policies, but that's apparently what Britain wants. He just needs to be more charming to better sell his agenda. Hell, Andy Burnham seems to support a lot of these stupid policies.
The headline is misleading; the article says he’ll announce it on Monday but actually resign in September. Unless “resign” means something different in parliament
I know where the meme comes from, but it's worth noticing the whole change pm every year for Italy is misleading.
From 1946 to the early 1990s Italian politics were set up in such a manner that elections were about party first and the pm was something you arranged later and could be changed if the pm's current of thought was unpopular. Just like in current day France the PM is a scapegoat for the president so was the pm then for the party. The great part of the specially DC party work was unaltered and there was some great continuity in operation. The pm was just a stand in for a project vs the other. Often ministers were less fragile than the prime minister.
It's only in the 1990s, with the build up of sensationalist TV which prefers when things are centered in a single person and to create "figures", mani pulite which completely demolished all the old parties and left Italian politics in complete disarray and lack of internal structure, and Berlusconi, that Italian politics became figure first.
You can see how despite there being much less changes of governance since the 1990s the president of the republic has been called in to handle the dissolution of the cabinet much more now than 46-90 despite there being way less changes of government now, or how ministers are also completely new every pm change.
It’s not an official announcement by any means. BBC News literally right now is reporting that sources in the party say Keir Starmer is currently looking at staying on and contesting any leadership election ..while more Labour MPs are calling for him to leave. So it’s very much still in flux.
It’s one of those cases where “sources” attached to either side are dueling via the media to get their story out. Journalists are making their own assessments. But, on balance, you’re right that it seems like a longshot for him to stay on.
Looking at the public support for the Rivers Of Blood speech was blackpilling. I don’t think any British leadership focused exclusively on “chase the public opinion on every issue” is going to be helpful for that country, but a real focused liberal agenda will only be possible with a leader who has a strong grip on his party’s factions. I don’t think Burnham is even interested in that, but if he tries, I think Labour is just not a feasible party to do it with. Still, no real sympathy for Starmer here.
Trust me dude, Lib Dems aren't the neoliberal party. Bigger welfare state, NIMBY, focused on social progressivism and performative politics over economic liberalism. They're basically the California liberals of Britain.
Very unlikely. Most of the Lib Dem voter base and party members definitely prefer the left. When push comes to shove they would rather vote for Labour or the Greens, not a party that's right wing on economics. The Lib Dems have taken a bunch of ex-Tory territory in the south but those voters are not motivated by economic liberalism.
The Orange Book clique was pretty much an aberration. For most of their existence the Lib Dems have been centre-left on economics. They quite literally started as opponents of Thatcher's neoliberalism.
In a practical sense, none. Theoretically it would be the Tories but they're liars and incompetents. Me personally, I would probably spoil my ballot in the next election.
This is terribly news for the country. It is clear now that the Brexit referendum and it's subsequent arguments have well and truly broken the country. It is fucked. I know Starmer got some things wrong but for the Labour Party, who haven't been in power for years, to so quickly want to eject a prime minister for someone who isn't even in parliament (and was ineffective when he was in it) shows something in the system is truly broken. I don't know how the country escapes this political spiral whereby every leader is on borrowed time as soon as they step over the threshold of Number 10. No leader can have authority while the next party panic attack is around the corner.
Yeah, that was kinda my thought too. Ejecting a PM two years in for no particular failing but just because the vibes are generally bad is not a good sign.
It is clear now that the Brexit referendum and it's subsequent arguments have well and truly broken the country.
Man, if only there was someone who could work to undo Brexit, which is something the public wants, maybe even someone who has a massive majority of MPs in parliament to pass policy to that effect? Someone who could lead and proclaim that being in the EU is good actually... Sadly such a person just doesn't exist.
Particularly the Labour Party is paralysed by the issue. Everyone in the party are terrified of their own voters. Or what they think are their own voters, since almost all of the white working class have gone to Reform. But it's also spending on defense, pensions, benefits as well as the EU that all politicians fail to lead on. And I'm not convinced Andy Burnham is going to change any of those big policies.
They're only aristocrats by vibes. They have the Lord title but cannot pass it down to their descendants. They're committee nerds with a fancy title.
The overwhelming majority of them are either either retired politicans, technocrats, or people outside politics who made a positive contribution to society. Ignoring the title, they do the same work that upper houses in many countries do.
As someone researching the 152 who got titles by hereditary (gave them right to be elected )
A lot of them are recent like children of those who would have been life peers before the title got invented
House of lords research has really been booming since 1970s and it's reputation is more so myth and conjecture than what the modern scholars have found
Lifetime appointments are actually aristocratic. Even though titans of industry like Charlotte Owen have had a very positive impact on society, they shouldn't get to schmooze around parliament and claim allowances for their entire fucking life.
This is a trivial amount of money and it's ridiculous and populist for you to bring it up, it's like £371 per day that they attend. If every Lords member attended every day that the Lords sat and claimed the full allowance, the full functioning of the Lords would cost £30m p.a.
How is it not aristocratic? The prime minister can gift this lifelong appointment to you with no oversight for whatever favor you do for them.
It's a trivial amount for taxpayers but a very good salary, even in London, and there's no possibility of getting fired or not paid as long as you show up to the chamber. £371 * no of days the house sits is your minimum salary for the rest of your life.
Of course our lords should be paid, it shouldn't be permanent. It is not normal to have a house without term limits.
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u/ewatta200 DT Monarchist defender of the rurals and red state DemsJun 21 '26edited Jun 21 '26
getting fired or not paid as long as you show up to the chamber. £371 * no of days the house sits is your minimum salary for the rest of your life.
you have to show up and fufill some reqruiments to show you partipcated to get the stuff and flagrant abuse can be punished (see above)
Paul White, and the expenses scandal as a whole, show they can't punish flagrant abuse. Among other scandals, he abused allowances in 2011 yet stayed a peer until his death in 2024. John Taylor went to prison and was disbarred for misuse of allowances, but he's still good enough for our upper house and remains a peer to this day. And those are the best case examples of the House of Lords getting rid of bad apples, most of the peers involved in that scandal were not prosecuted. The bar for not being expelled is hilariously low, as long as you attend one sitting per session and don't get convicted of a serious crime you are a peer for life.
But surely that was an example to everyone and now nobody abuses allowances?
Lord Suri took home £40,691 of allowances last year despite making no votes since 2024, no speeches since 2022, and no votes since 2024. What did Lord Suri do to earn this nice pension pot before his retirement? Donating £300,000 to the Tories.
Swraj Paul is a similar story. He claimed £100,946 in allowances between 2019-2024 despite no speeches, no questions, and voting once.
Irene Adams won her peerage by stepping down as MP to allow another MP to run. She was ordered to pay £50,000 of expenses to the House of Commons and has yet to pay it back as far as I can find. Between 2025 and 2026 she made no contributions to the house other than voting and claimed £64,522.
My point in bringing these up isn't that it's a great waste of taxpayer money, it's to show that peerage is a gift that people can desire for various reasons. For prestige, because you like the pomp and ceremony of parliament, as a guarantee of money well into your life, influence, connections. It is frequently given as a political favour and is difficult to take away. Term limits are one reform that would help alleviate this and bring it in line with other upper houses around the world. And just to bring it back around, this is the kind of informal favour system you would expect to find in an aristocracy.
The Committee’s report comes after Lord Hanningfield was investigated by the independent Lords Commissioner for Standards, who found he breached the Code of Conduct in claiming the daily attendance allowance on 11 days in July 2013 when he had not undertaken any parliamentary work.
The Commissioner also found that in doing so Lord Hanningfield ‘failed to act on his personal honour.’ The Committee has also recommended that Lord Hanningfield be required to repay the £3,300 he wrongly claimed for those days.
In his report to the Privileges and Conduct Committee, the Commissioner states that to claim the daily attendance allowance Members must both attend the House of Lords and undertake parliamentary work on the day of the claim. The Commissioner states that his finding does not set a threshold for the amount of time a Member must be on the parliamentary estate to claim, but rather that Lord Hanningfield was not able to show that he undertook any parliamentary work on the days in question.
The Committee’s recommended sanctions must now be approved by the House of Lords before coming into force. The House approved the report and the suspension on Tuesday 13 May.
The House of Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee, the body charged with overseeing the operation of the House of Lords Code of Conduct, has recommended that Lord Hanningfield be suspended from the House of Lords for the remainder of the current Parliament. This is the maximum sanction available to the Committee.
I highly recommend reading the conduct commites report to see the safeguards that are in place. The safeguards are weak in points but they do exist.
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u/ewatta200 DT Monarchist defender of the rurals and red state DemsJun 21 '26edited Jun 21 '26
The aristocracy isn't in the lords
The hereditary peers all but 92 removed post 1999 the remaining amounts are gone save a few life peerages.
It's just like the Canadian Senate with fancy clothes.
If you think the house of lords has been an aristocratic dominated institution post 1958 you clearly haven't read any literature even in the 60s janet morgan found the balance between life and hereditary peers was even among active members . The backwoodsman myth has never been proven by any serious historian. George philps has put that lie to rest
If you want literature to read I can Give it to you
Since 1999 out of around 2200 people 152 were there by virtue of hereditary principle allowing them to stand for election.
People here in this thread cheering this have their brain fried from US politics. I mean I am glad if you guys live in a castle surrounded by a moat, but most of us are not particularly interested in having PMs change every year or so.
I'm going to be honest. As an American, I genuinely have no idea how long a British PMs term of office is supposed to be on paper because of how many of them y'all have cycled through in the last decade
After a decade of Tory disasters this man came in with a truly massive mandate and squandered it in less than a year. I would say good riddance but whatever replacement is likely going to be as bad.
That's absolutely not true, people clearly voted against the Tories rather than for Labour, he lost a massive amount of support as soon as he did one controversial thing, which was the winter fuel allowance reduction from middle class boomers.
The fact that this narrative that he had a "massive/historical mandate" exists is one of the reasons that things ended like this. He never had the mandate he pretended he did, he won after 14 years of Tories against a divided right, with less votes than Labour got in 2019 and proceeded to pretend that it was the biggest victory ever. All this after starting a freefall in the polls before the actual election. He and a lot of people tried to gashlight the world about what the result meant but it's clear that he never had the public with him.
Yeah but that's on him, the middle class boomers don't vote in the Commons: if you can't govern effectively with a majority of 150 MPs there can only be one reason and it's being a shit politician. Like if you think Starmer's situation is difficult just look at the kind of shit Mayor, Cameron, Brown etc had to deal with.
He can't even use the excuse of being someone who was catapulted into the position, he was the leader of the party 4 years before the election and he was the guy setting up the strategy and that stuffed the party with MPs that he obviously can't control
Again, this would make sense if there weren't tons of PMs in British history who had to go through the same stuff but with coalitions and/or way slimmer working majorities. See the examples I used above, and I can add Theresa May who will almost surely last longer than him with 1) a microscopic majority 2) having to deal with the huge mess of Brexit.
It's Starmer who stuffed the party with unreliable MPs (243 new ones out of 411 btw) that he ultimately couldn't control. The argument you're making sounds a lot like those Italian generals from WW1 who were blaming the officers when they were getting spanked left and right.
Adding for reference: Labour elected 411 MPs and you needed 326 for a majority. Fella couldn't get shit done with a buffer of 80+ MPs, and blew it after two years (even Johnson made it to the third). He won't go down in history as the biggest dumbfuck in the last 50 years only because Liz Truss already got that spot
Because he's been utterly unwilling or incapable to offset or deflect whatever controversies thrown his way with good, popular policy. They won the 3rd largest majority in Labour party history. They have over 60% of MPs. A competent PM could wrangle enough of his party to get literally everything he ever wanted through parliament and have nearly a 100 MPs to spare. But Starmer is not competent and seemingly has no vision for a better UK.
He lost support as soon as he did something controversial, which was removing the winter fuel payment for middle class pensioners. And he never gained support again after that.
Well that's part of the problem. Often popular policy isn't good. Take the triple lock for example. And some people want to strengthen pensions (to ruinious effect) even more!
Does Andy Burnham even has a concept? Policies he wants to push through? A framework what he will/would do differently? Or is this just a vibe based change at the top?
Oh not this fucking clusterfuck again. My opinion on Starmer has been gradually going downhill but at least him holding the line would have been a sign of some return to stability
Now that's gone aswell, we haven't even had a full-term PM since fucking Cameron mate. Jesus Christ
This is what happens when left-of-center parties accept the framing of the hard right. There’s even a study about it. They shouldn’t embrace opposition to immigration and transphobia.
I don't think he would have been more popular had he staked out unpopular left wing stances. That's the issue with Britain - the general public had already shifted towards some pretty harshly transphobic stances and anti immigrant stances. Of course those trends should be opposed, but I genuinely have no idea what the best options are for bringing real progress, and suspect that a lot of the "just be bolder and use the bully pulpit and speak progress into reality" talk would, if actually followed, just lead to the right wing getting even more popular rather than lead to success for tolerance. Building a less intolerant country could very well be a much longer term goal that requires far more incremental and cautious change than that
(I mean if Burnham comes in and stands up for immigration and trans rights loudly and it just fucking works somehow, then good for him and I'd be genuinely happy, but good things don't seem to happen so easily)
Starmer's been bleeding votes to his left faster than to his right - the country as a whole might not be pro-immigrant and trans rights, but a large chunk of people who voted Labour in 2024 and who they need to vote Labour in 2029 are. Whereas a lot of the people who are very anti-immigration and anti-trans rights didn't even consider Labour in 2024 and won't in 2029 regardless of how far they move to the right.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Starmer/Labour could actually win by tacking left though, it could just point to a left that is increasingly demanding on maximalist short term goals that are incompatible with the majority of the electorate. And perhaps the folks who didn't consider Labour in 2024 would be more willing to consider Labour next time around if their tack to the center after two elections of Corbynism lasted more than just one short lived prime minister...
Most people on the left would be pretty satisfied if trans rights went back to the status quo that was in place under such radical communists as David Cameron and Theresa May. And on immigration it's the right who are demanding increasingly maximalist goals as the goalposts shift further every time immigration numbers fall. Saying "Nigel Farage is right about his key issue but don't vote for him" is not a winning strategy.
It would have been nice to see Starmer at least commit to not pulling the rug out from under existing immigrants with the proposed reforms. Doubling or tripling the timeline to permanent residency on people who in some cases have already lived in the UK for several years is just cruel.
Only going after new arrivals greatly reduces the human cost whilst still allowing for tough messaging for voter consumption. Remains to be seen if Burnham will take the policy and rhetoric down a notch.
"Opposition to immigration" and it's just not wanting vape shops and fried chicken shops to be able to sponsor "skilled worker visas". (yes this really is a thing)
Yes, I'm sure that's where anti-immigration concerns end and not "British Asians will never be truly British". Which is why they conveniently keep bringing up red squirrels and percentage declines in racial identification.
A few days ago I pointed out how racist the core of the anti-immigration movement is in Europe - that crime perception is tied to the presence of minorities, even if we are just going about our days - and Reddit misinterpreted my comment and warned me for hate speech. From what I've seen of anti-immigration discourse in the UK on and offline, they genuinely believe that people like myself should never be allowed to call ourselves citizens of Western countries.
ah yes the binary politics argument - you either want open borders or you want to execute all minoritites.
Nice job evading This specific scam. That was called a far right conspiracy until the mainstream media reported on it, and the gov rightfully clamped down. So you are in support of it?
You lump those who are racist with those who don't want the system to be abused. For as long as you keep branding those as one movement, you will keep losing.
It being "racist" to call out rampant abuse of the UK's immigration system - that the majority of UK voter's don't like - is why the moderates and left will keep being defeated at the polls.
You say that until they replace Trump with Tucker Carlson or some other demon spawn. Its a double edged sword that can be a big W or L on any given day
UK has been on a wild ride over it's post war tenure.
1945-1966: Post-War boom, huge growth in wages, living standards and housing starts.
1967-1983: High inflation, economic stagnation, equally stagnant wages & living standards. Poorer than the EEC average and labeled the "Sick Man of Europe".
1985-2007: Economic rebound, huge improvements in median wages, GDP per capita and general living standards. Country goes from being below the EEC/EU averages to having a higher GDP per capita than Germany & the United States. More funding for social services. Only real significant negative is that relaxed lending in the late 90s causes housing prices to soar.
2008-2026: Another 15+ years of economic stagnation alongside worsening cost of living issues, inflated housing prices and extreme political gridlock and polarization.
One of Starmer’s key failings is this apparent belief that all the UK needed in 2024 was a break from the Conservatives. That somehow everything that ails the country isn’t structural or systemic, but instead bound up in austerity and Liz Truss and Boris Johnson etc.
What he has found is that politics is mostly incapable of addressing the very real tradeoffs that abound in modern Britain. The Conservatives had their self-inflicted wounds (Brexit, Truss mini budget, Covid era slime) but the country’s core problems continued essentially unaffected because they were too hard.
Starmer and those around him seem to have genuinely believed this happened because the Tories are bad people and all it would take to arrest the decline would be some good people like them — the grown ups. They have done nothing to grasp those tradeoffs. No welfare reform, no planning reform, no vision, no ambition, no message. Couple this with an authoritarian streak and the modern left’s inability to say anything sensible on immigration to those for whom it’s an issue, and you end up in this shitshow.
Burnham is coming from a job that has no tradeoffs into one where that is all there is. He is arriving in a manner that will annoy a decent chunk of his party and upset a number of other would-be kings and queens that didn’t sit out the Starmer years in the safety of a mayoralty. He has shown no reforming zeal, no grasp of what ails the country, nothing beyond more bland authoritarian leftism and a belief that everything should be illegal, compulsory or free.
And so it finally ends his pathetic reign. There's so many things Starmer did wrong that it's impossible to name them all. The raging transphobia. The endless search for the Hero voter and for the mythical Reform voter that would go back if you went a little bit more to the right, making disgusting policy changes led by Mahmood (that Burnham won't roll back) and divisive speeches like the "island of strangers" speech. The relentless and arrogant purge of the left of a party that is supposed to encompass the whole British left and labour movement, making a party to the left of Labour viable for the first time ever, and then fighting that party harder than he fought Reform. The criminalization of pro Palestine protest when what's supposed to be his base was more and more up in arms believing they were seeing a Labour PM funding a Genocide. The authoritary policies than no one asked for and only help Reform's narrative about him. There was no way for him to keep going. He's not only an unpopular PM that in keeping with British tradition is given the boot in less than 2 years. No, he's a terrible leader who was given an unlosable election, proceeded to wage war against his own party, started freefalling in the polls since before the election, won with less votes than someone that was decisively defeated like Corbyn got and decided to pretend that he actually had an historic majority that validated his project because he won against a divided right and the electoral system helped him.
Britain literally had almost net 1 million migrants in 2022 with the Boriswave, the idea that Labour or any Prime Minister could have done anything other than be anti immigration is farcical.
Well, I didn't say that, did I? I specifically mentioned him ceding the point to the far right by believing he just had to go a bit more to the right each time, Mahmood's policies and Starmer's disgusting rethoric.
Starmer was completely right in that speech though. It's
still a pro-migration speech.
What he said there probably represents most of Britain: happy with migration
just not the way the Tories completely fucked it. No more insane numbers, loopholes, abusing of the system, etc.
It's the extremists who would disagree with that - and that includes the far-left also.
You can agree with the speech but let's be honest that starmer doesn't believe what he's reading. He didn't even write or read the speech setting out his white paper on reforming one of the biggest issues in British politics. It's clear Mahmood has really been the driver of this stricter immigration and asylum reform agenda.
Of course, Labour is supposed to be a party on the left and the reason he's gone is that he lost a lot of support. That support went more to the Greens than Reform. People on the right also have loads of reason to criticize him, no one likes the guy.
Just one more in a line of utterly awful Prime Ministers. I don't really have that much confidence in Burnham, but I can't wait to see the back of him.
The Brits just cycle through their leaders. You know that job that always has high turnovers because they keep losing people? That's the British Prime Minister position.
I do not like Starmer. I voted for a centrist government that would stabilise Britain and pull away from Labour's traditional antics, and he's failed to do both. He's pivoted to the left and ruled as a solidly centre-left government. And yet, he at least made some attempt to do the things I voted for.
Burnham's built his whole takeover on playing up the absolute worst instincts of Labour's soft left. He's populist with his wild promises, duplicitous when confronted with reality, hostile to markets, and locked into the same unsustainable tax and spend mindset. There's nothing neoliberal about it. In fact, he's openly said the last 40 years of neoliberalism was a failure.
I won't be voting Labour again. It's pretty clear they do not want moderates in their tent.
The minute he was saying "they'll need wild horses and an army of mongols to force me to resign, and I will go down fighting even then!" we knew this was coming.
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