General British politics discussion thread

I have no idea if it is a big problem or not, I just know that this hobby horse group announced yesterday that they observed some of it in person and people are using it to call into question the result yesterday. It is obvious to anyone with a brain that if people were going to do family voting, they would do it in the privacy of their own home and use postal votes.

Has a single constituency result in Britain believed to have been impacted by voter fraud since WW2? The sudden interest in it seems odd.

google is your friend here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutfur_Rahman_%28British_politician%29

That was a mayoral election though - presumably much easier to rig than a general election or by-election (low turnout, low profile candidates etc)

Labour has largely gone from being the party of the working classes to the party of the concerned classes, while still managing to collect most working class votes.

They have ignored the working class since the days of Blair - after Thatcher gutted the unions and decimated British industry, the actual number of people considering themselves working class dropped considerably as many of them moved into less manual/menial jobs. So these people look for others to represent them; it could be Reform if they are traditional English types, or maybe someone else who promises to look after their interests, such as in this case - an actual worker who gets their hands dirty on the job.

The concerned classes do not like Starmer, and particularly dislike his support for genocide. They won't vote Reform, could have voted LibDem, but Green is more the flavour of the week these days.

Finally - how many immigrants now vote Labour? Will any immigrant from a Muslim background vote for them ever again after Labour's support for mass murder of their Muslim brethern in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and various other middle-eastern countries?

Channel 4 news item saying there that Labour's strategy for hanging onto seats in the next general is basically telling people how bad Reform is.

I'm telling ye right now, and I cannot underline this enough - that's a road to hell. It does not work. If you don't have a positive message of your own, you're doomed to fail in the long term. Look at the Democrats in the US - all they really have is an anti-Trump message. They don't really have a platform on how to really bring society on and thus will never rid their country of MAGA. It'll be the same for Labour in the next election, which I think will come sooner than the regulation period.

He came in to politics to be Millibands AG, due to the baffling thing of the AG usually being an MP in the UK.

That didn't happen, so… why didn't he just leave?

The weird thing about Starmer is that he could have ended up in any party : the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, even Reform. He doesn't seem to stand for anything and doesn't have a 'Labour' identity.

How does one explain his shift to the right as party leader? He was apparently very left wing in his teenage years and yet is the one who hounded Corbyn and other socialist MPs out of the party in 2019/20.

To be fair, it's difficult to really get anything done in Britain as a truly left wing politician. Look at the job the British media did with demonising Jeremy Corbyn. Big business would be absolutely terrified of anyone like that getting into power. Far more comfortable with someone like Farage telling everyone the real problem is immigrants and repealing human rights legislation to deal with that (ostensibly) rather than telling people that hedge funds are vampirically extracting all the wealth out of society, for example…