General British politics discussion thread

A clueless statement from Starmer again

the rest of the Middle East agrees with Starmer though, no one wants Iran developing nukes.

I doubt if they care too much. Israel isn’t going to give nukes to some mad jihadi

He's quite right and everyone apart from centrists with their heads up their own arses about Starmer and his advisors could see it.

I’d say trump & benny’s actions in the ME are a blessing in disguise to take the British media’s investigation into the fallout of the Manchester bi election on Starmer.

DO you remember the Iranians celebrating when the Ayatollah flew from Paris to take power after the removal of the Shah?

Being cynical, I suspect the timing of this attack, in the middle of peace negotiations, has more to do with diverting attention away from Trumps Epstein links.

Israel is the maddest jihadi of them all in the middle east, they just dress a bit differently and have slightly different religious practices.

he spoke about traditional politics been broken

My take on this is multiple, but here are a couple of my thoughts.

To begin with, we live in a society of plenty, so we all have enough food, clothing and shelter to survive comfortably. There are those who fall through the cracks of course, but even our homeless have a roof over their heads, with the exception of the few who sleep rough. I'm not excusing any of the exceptions, and I think we could do more, but the very large majority of people in our western society is physically comfortable.

In second place, following from the above, the conditions that led to the rise of socialist and communist parties have disappeared: very large numbers of people carrying out manual work in very dangerous conditions - mostly mines and factories without proper safety measures - have also mostly dissappeared from our societies. Some of this has been outsourced to what used to be known as the 3rd world, some has been automated etc. Either way, it doesn't impinge on the lives of most of our working population.

A third factor is the huge working class now washing around the (post-)industrialised world. People moving from country, staying a while and moving on or going home after several years. Many of these work in menial jobs - hospitals, cleaning, hotels, restaurants and the like. The nature of their stay means that they are not full members of our society, and despite the large number of them, they cannot or do not vote in any numbers, meaning that they are unrepresented in our parliaments; and these people would generally be natural socialist/labour party voters.

Doubtless there are other factors involved, but traditional Labour politics no longer do the job. "Identity" politics was one of the responses in search of a constituency by many in Europe's left parties, and was a logical outgrowth from feminism (including women in the movement), anti-racism (including people of different origins in the movement) - but the numbers are small in comparison to the huge number of foreigners working and living in our society who are effectively disenfranchised.

@volchitsa

I had the misfortune of living near there once and believe me when I say not even the locals think much of where they live. Although that house they used in the 90s TV Pride and Prejudice is up that way and has a nice park.

Starmer now allowing the US to use UK bases - that essentially means the Cypriot base is now a target for Iran

You mean it wasn’t before?