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in the last 24 hours

I have watched Starmer being interviewed on TV and listened to Reeves being interviewed on the radio.  I have never heard so many questions that demand a yes or a no answered with such imprecision or such vague abandon of principles/values without being prepared to acknowledge it. 

I don't want to hear about "business pragmatism" being a reason why a party won't tell us what its policy is. I am not surprised that the left of the party is starting to ferment trouble.   Not just Corbyn but people like Miliband, E. 

Don't get me wrong,  the Government are utter shits with the same disease (let's suspend everything temporarily while it inconveniences us to have entered into an agreement or to have laws - e.g. insolvency, competition etc), but the reason we have such a shit government is that we have a totally shit opposition and they are not capable of holding the Government to account, as they cannot even direct themselves.    

I agree, Labour are still trying to ride two horses  - traditional brexity heartland and the younger middle class guardian set.   They dont want to offend either so say virtually nothing.  At the moment, and speaking as a member of the Labour party, I have no clue what the vision for a future Labour government is. 

Answer yes or no and you instantly alienate a portion of the watcher/listener. That concept now seems to dominate politics and it’s just pathetic. Everyone appears so weak and beige. 

Starmer gave ten pledges coming into the role - "ten principles for power" - which almost sounded like a vision but were more about his values than hard political decision making.  Since then he has been more specific but by the end of yesterday it seemed that he had abandoned nationalisation of utilities and there was a difference between him and his shadow chancellor on taxation. 

 

 

I sort of sympathise. Labour have no coalition of support to win a general election. They have lost so many ordinary working people now and there aren't enough guardian readers to make up the difference.  Their only hope is to try not to offend anybody and let Boris screw up the country so badly that they win by default because there is nobody else for people to vote for.

It's not enough and it almost certainly won't work. But it is still the best strategy they have because anything else just results in them losing even more badly. The party is finished I think. It isn't capable of reform. It needs to be put down so something else can grow that isn't constrained by the necessity of trying to hold together those obsessed with identity politics and those who actively hate it.  If labour splits it may be possible to build a new coalition in the centre particularly in a few years when we are firmly in a 'post brexit' world and we can start talking properly about how the UK deals with where it finds itself post brexit rather than arguing about whether it should be there in the first place.  I reckon there is a strong coalition to be had there centred around concern for the environment (but in a measured way that accepts there is only so much that can be done), better housing, better access to high quality education and a new settlement on employment rights that better enables people to find the work life balance they very much seem to want.  There has been a fundamental shift in the way ordinary people live their lives and bring up their kids.  Dual income is normal, two careers that really matter in a family is normal and men want to take a more active role in their children's lives. Flexibility and balance is no longer a 'women's issue'.  Actually having decent housing is more important for young people that nimby concerns about where it goes. In short the UK is pretty much ready to move towards a European social democratic model but nobody is really offering it. 

 

Labour are lost, albeit in a different way to the Comrade Corbyn era. The Tories are also actually fairly lost, but as they have an 80 majority they don't have the same need as Labour do to not look and feel lost. 

 

Question is, what would you/we do if in charge of Labour policy? Which way to jump that is a) appealing enough to get elected; b) thus, one presumes, different enough to the Tories to be distinctive; c) but also, again one presumes, appealing enough to at least some existing Labour voters so that it's not necessary to wholesale reinvent the party. Or is that in fact what's needed? In which case, into what?

the only way out is for lib lab electoral pact and ,if they can scrape home, immediately introducing PR, otherwise the Tories will control the country on less than 40 per cent of the vote for ever more.

I actually doubt if the lib dems will have more than 5 MP's after the next general election.  They had their one shot with Cameron and they fvcked it up. They really are finished. 

Neither the lib dems nor labour are drawing the lines in the right place to present an alternative to the tories that appeals to people. 

Lib-Lab pact is the only way forward for either party to prevent itself from withering into oblivion. If they can change the FPTP that will be a good thumb print for the generations and also assimilate regions and nations in a much better manner. 

They also need a workable appeal in Scotland to steer some of the tory voters their way. We forget Scotland has a sizeable tory population (conservative with small c). 

I actually doubt if the lib dems will have more than 5 MP's after the next general election.

 

That is not relevant, it is about uniting the anti tory vote behind one candidate.  Tory voters are a minority in most places but our electoral system means that is not reflected in the results.  When there were two parties who could potentially win majorities this was just about acceptable but obviously now we are in a position (particularly if Scotland leaves) where the FPTP system could effectively turn us into a one party state.

 Neither the lib dems nor labour are drawing the lines in the right place to present an alternative to the tories that appeals to people

Perhaps the trick is to work out what the electorate wants and manage from that rather than constantly being on broadcast telling them what they should think.  Blair understood that. The SPD have partially resurrected themselves in Germany.  The Conservatives came back from the Mulroney wipeout in Canada.  Older readers might recall that the Labour loss in 1992 meant they would never govern again.

I agree with a lot of what Mr Darko says, but some of it is very much from a middle class perspective.  For example:

There has been a fundamental shift in the way ordinary people live their lives and bring up their kids.  Dual income is normal, two careers that really matter in a family is normal and men want to take a more active role in their children's lives.

This may be true on an average basis (possibly) but we have certainly moved to a barbell distribution. Fathers in high income groups and/or from immigrant backgrounds more involved; fathers in lower income groups and/or British born less involved. 

An increasing number of children in the UK are raised with one parent (in 90%+ of cases a father) having little or no involvement in their lives. The number of single parent families has been increasing: https://www.statista.com/statistics/281640/single-parent-families-uk/  (The number has topped out in the last decade only because the percentage of children whose parent(s) are immigrants has increased and immigrants from most backgrounds are less likely to be single parents than those born in UK.)

Of the fathers in the UK who don't live with their children, the majority do not have regular contact with them (n weekends and during school holidays). 13% of fathers never see their children. (https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/nov/20/non-resident-dads…)

 

I can't see the Lib vote riding to the rescue here. It's just not large enough, surely? Even if one strips out the distortive effect of FPTP. 

I think the PR stuff is not going anywhere either. That was Clegg in 2011 and he of course blew that along with pretty much everything else. 

Surely it's go with what enough people want to get into power with a majority and work from there? But what do people want that isn't crazy and is vaguely deliverable and is different from the Tories?

Medley politics has become too fractured, there is no one thing people want that is enough to deliver a majority over the Tories in FPTV system.   The party coalitions are now clearly not fit for purpose - Labour needs to split into a socialist party  and a social democratic party and the Tories need to split into a populist nationalist party - the boris party effectively, and a CDU style pro business centre right party.  

I feel like it will be Scotland breaking away that forces some electoral realignment. Right now everything seems stuck.

Even if Labour supported PR and could notionally form a coalition government to pass it, I doubt the SNP would support it at this point. 

Rob - Can't say that I have the stats to hand but I am reasonably sure lower class absent fathers don't tend to vote very often either. From the point of view of building general election winning coalitions they are not really a factor.  Labour needs to go after that old cliche of 'hard working ordinary families'. 

 

 

@Guy  This is nonsense:

The party coalitions are now clearly not fit for purpose - Labour needs to split into a socialist party  and a social democratic party and the Tories need to split into a populist nationalist party - the boris party effectively, and a CDU style pro business centre right party.  

The German CDU is not a pro business party. The pro business party in Germany is the FDP. The two terms "socialist party" and a "social democratic party" are used so interchangeably that it is impossible to know what the distinction between them is without defining them differently in the first place. 

British people with very limited levels of knowledge of other European countries and their  respective socio-politics need to stop trying to make comparisons between UK political party ideology and those of other European countries. For example, it's impossible to understand the CDU without understanding its foundation among Catholics and Evangelicals and the influence of distributism and ortholiberalism, which is completely different from the UK Conservatives. 

@Mr Darko  Agreed that lower income absent fathers were one of the demographics least likely to vote. However, their effective abandonment by Labour resulted in UKIP/Brexit and now the Conservatives making inroads. 

I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that labour abandoning low income absent fathers (specifically) resulted in Brexit tbh. 

I do agree that the political establishment as a whole completely abandoning struggling working class communities in Wales and the North of England resulted in Brexit and yes, the way that boys in particular from those communities were utterly failed by an education system that is not fit for purpose is part of a very big problem in the UK (of which absent fathers are just one symptom).

I hope there will be a party in government at some stage that has a proper bash at fixing that (to be fair to new labour they did try/chuck some money at it)

 

 

 

 

Agree with Pancakes at 10.40 as that is a reality for Labour today. 

If England were to find itself "operating" on its own, perhaps alongside Wales, Tories will rule the country for the coming decades. In many ways Scotland moving on to create a quasi-socialist State might just relieve England of the obligation to appear as socialist to a degree. 

Agree with the assessment of what CDU is and that its conservative element only comes from the religious side while fiscally they are hardly that conservative. Although Merkel was more fiscally conservative than Kohl.

I am not sure whether Tories today have a choice apart from being what they are - fiscally liberal and borrowing like a labour government. Not just because there is no aspiration within its ranks to be fiscally conservative. They have already redefined themselves as different from the usual Tories (the predecessors) and it is likely that they will continue on this. 

So what is left for Labour to capture apart from make small noises about this and that. I suspect it will come down to tax adjustment (reduce the ever increasing burden on the lower paid) while still retaining the confidence of businesses. On the plus side most, if not all, of the business organisations are (a) fed up of the tories; and (b) realise there will be a tax increase for some of the big entities. Whether they can sell that to the middle classes, while still appearing business friendly, remains a challenge. 

Seems to me the current Tory party has little in common with the economically liberal centre right post war Conservative party.   It’s rallying point is nationalism rather than a conservative economic policy.

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